U.S. The Parched West
Mighty Rio Grande Now a Trickle Under Siege
FABENS, Tex. — On maps, the mighty Rio Grande meanders 1,900 miles, from southern Colorado’s San Juan Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. But on the ground, farms and cities drink all but a trickle before it reaches the canal that irrigates Bobby Skov’s farm outside El Paso, hundreds of miles from the gulf.
Now, shriveled by the historic drought that has consumed California and most of the Southwest, that trickle has become a moist breath.
“It’s been progressively worse” since the early 2000s, Mr. Skov said during a pickup-truck tour of his spread last week, but he said his farm would muddle through — if the trend did not continue. “The jury’s out on that,” he said.
Drought’s grip on California grabs all the headlines. But from Texas to Arizona to Colorado, the entire West is under siege by changing weather patterns that have shrunk snowpacks, raised temperatures, spurred evaporation and reduced reservoirs to record lows.
In a region that has replumbed entire river systems to build cities and farms where they would not otherwise flourish, the drought is a historic challenge, and perhaps an enduring one. Many scientists say this is the harbinger of the permanently drier and hotter West that global warming will deliver later this century. If so, the water-rationing order issued this month by Gov. Jerry Brown of California could be merely a sign of things to come...
Across the West, the water shortages plaguing farmers and townspeople alike share many of the same causes. Like the Sacramento River in California and the Colorado River in the Rockies, the Rio Grande gets much of its flow from melting mountain snow — and snowpacks are getting smaller, and melting faster.
Rising temperatures are the reason. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which manages much water in the West, reported in 2013 that average temperatures in the upper Rio Grande, in Colorado and New Mexico, rose almost 2.8 degrees during the 40 years ending in 2011 — and could rise an additional four to six degrees by 2100.
The 40-year increase, twice the global average, was beyond anything seen in the last 11,300 years. Future warming “has the potential to cause significant environmental harm and change the region’s hydrology,” the bureau’s analysis stated.
A warming climate turns some snow into rain and increases the evaporation and melting rate of what snow remains. And as drought worsens, dust and soot from parched soil and burning forests coat the snow and absorb sunlight, turbocharging the melting...
