What a difference a year makes!
A year ago, all the water talk in the West was about the instability of the Colorado River system, the dangerously low levels that water stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell were reaching, and about the vital importance of conserving our water supplies.
Recently Arizona Water News asked Arizona State Climatologist Erinanne Saffell, as well as Mark O’Malley, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service, to provide some expert analysis of the spate of early-to-mid-winter storms that have made for a surprisingly wet winter in the West thus far.
As the saying goes, very few things in life are guaranteed. Nevertheless, that short list of life’s guarantees just got a wee bit longer:
The chances that the panel of experts that analyzes Arizona’s drought status would recommend a “drought’s over!” finding this fall were about as close to zero as you could get.
The crisis on the Colorado River System is capturing the attention of the world. News accounts filled with mouth-drying terms such as “dead pool” and “system crash” have reached readers in Berlin, Mumbai, Tokyo and elsewhere. The image of a speedboat sitting upright in what used to be Lake Mead with its stern buried in the mud has illustrated literally hundreds of news accounts. And, then, there are the countless reports of the discovery of human remains revealed in the receding waters of Lake Mead. The eyes of the world literally are upon Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
