Question of the Day - 03 January 2024

We know that after a 20-year-and-counting drought, Lake Mead is deep in the unhealthy zone, having dropped more than 45 feet between January 2020 and December 2022. And that was after dropping roughly 125 feet from 2000 to 2020.

However, the wicked winter of 2023 turned the tables at least temporarily. You know that sunken boat that surfaced with the dropping lake level? It's submerged again. In fact, the lake's surface has risen by more than 20 feet over the last year or so and is now higher than it was in 2021, which was completely unexpected. 

Of course, that's still just a few drops in a huge bucket, considering that we'd need another 8-10 similarly ferocious winters in a row for the lake to recover to where it was in the 1990s. So far this winter, the snowpack in the Colorado Basin watershed is barely two-thirds of typical for early January; the last time it was this low was 2017-2018, one of the lowest snowpacks since 1987. It would take 15 more feet of snowpack to put Mead at 2020 levels, with another 15 to reach 2019's.

All is not lost for this season, though. With nearly 100 days remaining till the typical peak of the snowpack, encompassing the usually snowy months of February and March, there's still a long way to go before calling this snow year a bust. 

Meanwhile, doom and gloom continue to pervade official projections, going so far as to predict dead-pool status for sometime this decade, meaning the lake would be rendered unable to provide electricity and water for upwards of 40 million people downstream. But no one really knows what the future has in store for the lake, so we'll just have to wait and see.