LAS VEGAS — One of the Colorado River’s two major reservoirs is expected to collect better than average runoff this year, thanks to an unusually wet La Nina pattern that dropped a deluge of snow up and down the basin.
Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir that sits on the border of Utah and Arizona, is expected to receive 117% of its average inflows as the heavy snowpack melts in the western Rockies during the all-important April through July time frame, said Cody Mosier, a hydrologist with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
Snowfall in recent months has brought snowpack levels across much of the Upper Colorado River Basin to roughly 139% of the region’s 30-year-average, and it now sits at roughly 85% of what is normally seen through an entire snow season with more than two months left before the usual snowpack peak, according to data kept by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
