On July 11, the Rio Grande dried up at the streamflow gauge about 18 miles upstream from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. It was notable, because this stretch of riverbed was once actually underneath Elephant Butte Reservoir, the state’s largest reservoir and an important storage facility for downstream irrigators. But by this summer, two decades of drought had reduced Elephant Butte to just 1.7% of its 652 billion-gallon capacity, leaving behind a mudflat that soon became a dry, dusty riverbed. By September, however, the previously barren riverbed was flowing at more than 3,000 cubic feet per second. Elephant Butte’s surface level rose by several feet, and the green chile-growing communities of the Lower Rio Grande Valley experienced severe flooding caused by record-breaking rainfall boosted by a hurricane in the Pacific.
In many ways, this contrast of extreme dryness with surprising amounts of drenching moisture provides a snapshot of the 2026 water year, which ended on Sept. 30. In the Colorado River and Rio Grande watersheds, it was marked by both intense drought and record-breaking rains that inspired devastating wildfires later followed by catastrophic floods. One of the driest 10 months on record was bookmarked by record-breaking rainfall.
In short, the 2026 water year was one of the weirdest ever experienced by much of the West. And climate change’s fingerprints are all over it.
The water year started off on a rainy note, especially in the San Juan River Basin in southwestern Colorado, the source of one of the Colorado River’s largest tributaries. Remnants of a tropical storm dumped over 6 inches of rain in about 48 hours at Wolf Creek Pass, near the headwaters of the San Juan and Rio Grande. This caused the San Juan River to swell to more than 8,000 cubic feet per second, jump its banks, and wreak havoc and destruction on the town of Pagosa Springs. It also boosted the surface elevation of Navajo Reservoir on the Colorado-New Mexico border by some 50 feet.
It all seemed to bode well for the winter to come. If that amount of moisture were to fall as snow, it would provide a deep base for skiers and for the following spring’s runoff, which is what keeps the nation’s second-biggest reservoir, Lake Powell, from going dry. But this year, the snow failed to fall like it normally would, even in the depths of winter. When it did fall, it tended to melt, sometimes even before it reached the ground.
Part of the problem was timing: The abundant precipitation came too early to fall as snow. But the biggest factor was temperature. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data reveals that most of the West experienced its warmest autumn and winter on record. The only exception was the Pacific Northwest, which had its second-warmest autumn and winter in 130 years. The result was that even places that received near-normal precipitation accumulation and weren’t technically in a drought suffered through one of the most severe snow droughts in recorded history.
The West’s streams and rivers — and therefore its reservoirs and irrigation ditches and municipal water systems — depend on snowmelt for at least 80% of their flows. A bad snow year leads to scant runoff, which in turn drains reservoirs. In September, Lake Powell reached its lowest level since the 1960s, setting off alarms across the region for the tens of millions of people that rely on it.
Droughts — even snow droughts — aren’t unusual in the West. Nor are extreme weather fluctuations. But this year’s drought was one of the most severe in over a century. A peer-reviewed paper published this summer out of the Colorado School of Mines determined that it was almost certainly the result of human-caused climate change.
The authors found that across the West as a whole, the 2026 snow drought was about four times more likely to occur in the current climate than during the 1850-1900 comparison period. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, where the drought was most severe, these dire conditions were about 14 times more likely to occur in our current climate than in pre-industrial times.
That doesn’t mean we should expect severe snow droughts every year from here on out. But as global temperatures continue to increase, Westerners should gird themselves for more extreme, increasingly weird, and very often destructive weather.
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