Monday March 10, 2025
The Salt Lake Tribune —
Winter is drawing to a close, and with it, so are the chances of boosting snowpack across the Colorado River Basin.
The mountains in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming saw a cluster of storms last month that aided their snowpack levels. But it wasn’t enough to make any meaningful dent into the forecasts, said Brenda Alcorn, a forecaster at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
We “saw a really nice bump” from storms in February, Alcorn said during a briefing Friday, “but as we dried out and warmed up in the later part of the month, that came right back down. So, the forecast for the Lake Powell inflows did not change.”
As of March 6, snowpack above Lake Powell was at 88% of average; “average,” in forecasting, refers to the average precipitation in the area between 1991 and 2020. That’s similar to the snowpack level last month, which was 86% of normal as of Feb. 1.