State, region face another drought year
But mountainous Taos County in better shape than most
As water storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoirs — sank further into historic lows in April and May, threatening both electricity and drinking water supplies for millions of people in the South-west, New Mexico’s top water officials are focused on the state’s response to ongoing drought conditions.
“The [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] forecast continues to be for aboveaverage temperatures and belowaverage precipitation across the state,” Hannah Riseley-White, deputy director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission told commissioners during their April 21 meeting. “We really are heading into a rough season in terms of the third year of a multi-year drought.”
On average, water volumes in the state’s storage reservoirs are sitting “at roughly 53 percent of the long-term normal,” according to April’s New Mexico Basin Outlook Report, which is produced by the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Albuquerque.
“It’s spring, it’s the start of irrigation season,” State Engineer Mike Hamman said in his report to commissioners, adding that he has meetings set up throughout the state to review water sharing agreements in “several basins” where water users are looking at a lean water year.
Unfortunately, the biggest component of the state’s drought mitigation comes down to this: Pray for rain. The Monsoon season usually begins in the first week of July.
“We don’t expect to see any significant moisture for the next 60 days or so,” Hamman said. “But there are some indications that New Mexico and Arizona will see a monsoon season, similar indicators to what we saw this time last year from the National Weather Service.”
“But we are facing another low [snow melt] runoff scenario,” Hamman added. “With the tightening hydrology, people are getting more concerned and nervous about this particular runoff — and future years.”
According to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report, most of New Mexico is experiencing D3 “Extreme Drought” and D4 “Exceptional Drought” conditions, the latter being the highest drought severity level. Most of Taos County was experiencing D3 extreme drought conditions as of Tuesday (May 10), while a sliver of the county along the New Mexico-Colorado border is in D2 “Severe Drought.”
The ongoing drought comes as no surprise to ranchers and farmers in Taos County, although conditions here are more favorable than in other parts of the state, said Peter Vigil, district manager for the Taos Soil and Water Conservation District. He said that the snowpack this year “doesn’t look that bad” for the conservation district, which more-or-less encompasses Taos County.
“We should have an OK irrigation season for this year. Most of our watersheds will give us adequate water until the monsoon,” he told the Taos News, recalling far worse conditions one winter about 8-10 years ago. “I went to get firewood, and usually you can’t even get into the forest between Thanksgiving and April, but that year I was getting wood in January — there was no snow.”
Meanwhile, state officials are ramping up a pilot program in communities along the Lower Rio Grande that pays farmers to fallow their land rather than irrigating it with groundwater, on which the agricultural community has become more dependent in the face of growing surface water shortages.
But in Taos County and the northern mountains, “the outlook is only slightly below average” for snowmelt runoff, Vigil said, cautioning that the long-term outlook is less rosy for the state as a whole.
“Since we’re in an arid place, it doesn’t look that good for New Mexico in the years to come,” he said. “However, one caveat is the mountainous regions, of which Taos is one. The Office of the State Engineer report says the severity will be less in the higher elevations.
“What I notice is — and we were told this — a majority of our precipitation is going to come from rainfall as opposed to snowpack in the coming years,” Vigil added. “That’s just the way weather is predicted to behave. But we’ve also been seeing rains later in the season: You don’t need rain in October, but you get it in October.”
Decreased snowpack, more concentrated snowmelt due to warming temperatures, parched ground absorbing more runoff before it reaches streams and less favorable rainfall is all contributing to water shortages across the Southwest, where over-allocated surface water is forcing communities to become increasingly dependent on groundwater, further depleting aquifers.
New Mexico is one of seven states that rely, to varying degrees, on surface water from streams within the Colorado River Basin. The San Juan River, for example, feeds into the once-mighty Colorado just above Lake Powell in Arizona. The seven basin states have held frequent high-level meetings in recent years to address the nowrealized water shortage caused by climate change and chronically over-allocated water rights within the Colorado River system.
If conditions don’t improve, New Mexico may need to dump extra water into the system this fall and winter from Navajo Lake, a reservoir on the San Juan River above Farmington.
New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission Director Rolf Schmidt-Peterson and State Engineer Mike Hamman joined April’s ISC meeting remotely from Salt Lake City, where they attended a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission, along with New Mexico’s commission representative and two-time former ISC director, Estevan Lopez. The River Commission is made up of representatives from Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, and is responsible for allocating appropriate amounts of water to the lower basin states — Nevada, Arizona and California — and Mexico in accordance with two compact agreements.
Lopez told stream commissioners that the Upper Colorado River Commission had approved a 2022 Drought Response Operations Plan in compliance with the Drought Response Operations Agreement (DROA) that was approved by Congress in 2019.
“Last year, the Bureau of Reclamation unilaterally took an emergency action to release 161,000 acre feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir [on the border of Wyoming and Utah] and Blue Mesa [reservoir] in Colorado, and delayed some releases that essentially propped up the level in Lake Powell by almost 500,000 acre feet,” Lopez said.
This year’s just-approved plan “calls for a release of 500,000 acre feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir down to Powell during what we term a ‘DROA year,’ that is from May 1 of this year through April 30 of next year,” he added.
If power generation and water supplies continue to be threatened at Lake Powell and Lake Mead below it, and dependent wateravailability, releases from the Blue Mesa Reservoir along the Gunnison River will be considered next, with releases from New Mexico’s Navajo Lake last in the line of contingency actions designed to prop up water levels.
“There are no releases that are anticipated from either the Blue Mesa or Navajo reservoirs this water year, that is until September of this year,” Lopez said. “However, if the hydrology improves in those reservoirs, and there’s a further need this fall or winter, there might be a consideration to make releases out of those two reservoirs. If there were such a release, I think that it would probably be very nominal.”
Hamman told the Taos News that, despite the shortages, “Things in New Mexico are going to stay relatively stable.”
According to the contingency plan approval letter signed on April 29 by Tanya Trujillo, a former ISC commissioner who is now the U.S. Department of Interior assistant secretary of water and science, there will be “no anticipated recovery of DROA release volumes through the term of the 2022 plan.”
On May 3, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation formalized the drought response plan, which also calls for a reduction in the water that’s normally released to downstream users from Glen Canyon Dam. Seven million acre feet of water will be released this year, a reduction of 480,000 acre feet, or roughly 156 billion gallons less than normal.
In a May 4 letter outlining the Glen Canyon Dam operations decision, Trujillo said Reclamation’s concerns centered around public safety and health concerns “if Lake Powell were to decline below critical elevations. These include water supply interruptions to users that rely on Lake Powell for drinking water supplies, hydropower interruptions … and increased uncertainty regarding downstream releases should Lake Powell elevations continue to decline.”
Were water levels to decline below the threshold necessary for Glen Canyon Dam to produce electricity, Hamman said communities in New Mexico and across the West would likely be hit with higher utility prices.
“This agreement is an unprecedented cooperative action on the part of the seven basin states and the federal government to try to preserve the hydro power pool in a positive situation for at least the following year,” he said. “That’s a major renewable energy supply.”
‘Since we’re in an arid place, it doesn’t look that good for New Mexico in the years to come. However, one caveat is the mountainous regions, of which Taos is one. The Office of the State Engineer report says the severity will be less in the higher elevations.’
PETER VIGIL
District manager for the Taos Soil and Water Conservation District