Colorado’s mountain snowpack is hovering around average so far this winter despite flatlining snowfall in December.
While winter recreationists might watch the buildup of snow in Colorado’s mountains with skiing or snowmobiling in mind, many water managers are watching for one thing: water supply. The state’s snowpack is a vital frozen reservoir for communities across Colorado, 19 downstream states and Mexico — one that is being strained by rising temperatures and prolonged drought.
As of Monday, the snowpack measured slightly below normal for early January, at 95% of the median between 1991 and 2020, according to federal data.
“It’s pretty close, in the grand scheme of things, to where you’d expect to be at this point in the winter,” said Russ Schumacher, Colorado state climatologist and a professor at Colorado State University.
The snow that accumulates in Colorado’s mountains eventually melts in the spring and provides water to farmers, cities, industries and ecosystems in major river basins like the Colorado River Basin, which supports 40 million people across the West.
Huge, early-season snowstorms in late October and November, like a blizzard in southern Colorado, gave the snowpack a head start — helpful in light of the sparse snowfall across many of the state’s major river basins for most of December, the third warmest December on record for the state.
It was the conclusion to a very warm year, Schumacher said. Globally, 2024 was the warmest year on record since 1850, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The year 2024 was the fourth warmest in Colorado, compared to a record stretching back 130 years, Schumacher said. Eight of the top 10 warmest years for Colorado have been since 2012.
Warmer days can contribute to large but less-frequent storms, drought, wildfire potential, harsh conditions for native fish and greater uncertainty for irrigators in Colorado.
Snowfall around Colorado
Snowfall totals, like temperature, can vary widely across Colorado, depending on whether you’re looking at a single community, small watershed or a large river basin.
As of Sunday, the snowpack was normal, or close to it, in most of Colorado’s major river basins like the Gunnison and Colorado River headwaters on the Western Slope, and the South Platte and Arkansas basins on the Front Range and Eastern Plains.
The Yampa, White and Little Snake river basin in northwestern Colorado was below average until a Christmas storm brought it to its normal snowpack levels, according to data from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The federal agency pulls this data from a network of individual measuring stations, called snow-telemetry stations, that are mostly located between 9,000 and 11,600 feet in elevation.
“You look at the numbers early on and they look really bad. They’ve caught up at least for now. A long way to go yet in that area,” Schumacher said. “It was the opposite in southern Colorado.”
After the big storms in October and November, precipitation in two southern basins — the San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan and the Upper Rio Grande river basins — was scant in December. The snowpack in both regions was below normal, 80% and 79%, respectively as of Sunday.
The early storms helped Purgatory Resort, just north of Durango, open early this year, said Jim Brantley, the resort’s director of mountain operations. A “Christmas miracle” storm helped add to the 33-inch base on the slopes, he said, which still had icy areas over the weekend.
But going forward, he expects ski seasons could start later — which makes snowmaking even more important. The resort is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to make those systems more efficient, he said.
“The future of the ski business in the desert southwest, at least the Christmas season, may well depend on snowmaking going into the future if the warming trend continues,” he said. “Ski resorts live and die by the Christmas season and the spring break season.”
Conditions in the Colorado River Basin
Colorado’s Western Slope is part of, and a main water source for, the broader Colorado River Basin. Overall, the basin’s snowpack is slightly less than normal for mid-January.
In December, the Upper Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — had about 65% of the normal snowpack from 1991 to 2020, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. About 85% to 95% of the basin’s water comes from the Upper Basin mountain snowpack.
“We’re off to a pretty dry start,” said Paul Miller, a hydrologist at the center. So far it’s comparable to early snow accumulation in 2024, 1998 and 1994. “We are still really early in the season.”
The forecast center predicted the Colorado River’s flows this year will be around 84% of average, or about 5.4 million acre-feet. The forecasts become more certain in March and April, Miller said.
One acre-foot would cover a football field in a foot of water.
Lower flows in the river are an ongoing strain on the basin’s system of reservoirs, which help pace water deliveries to farms and communities throughout the year. Water levels in the two largest reservoirs, lakes Powell and Mead, are still recovering from historic lows in 2021 and 2022.
Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, was at 35% of its capacity as of Monday. Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border, was at 34% of its capacity.
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