Utah is about halfway through its typical snow season. It’s not looking good.
Statewide snowpack hit a record low in early February. Utah is averaging 5.1 inches of snow water equivalent — a measurement of how much water is in snow — across the state’s network of mountain weather stations. That’s the lowest in any February since the SNOTEL system started in 1980.
It’s just over half of what Utah typically has at this time of year. Conditions have dipped into grim territory from the Wasatch Range around Salt Lake City to the Pine Valley Mountains near St. George.
“This is not an isolated concern,” said Jon Meyer, assistant state climatologist at the Utah Climate Center. “This is all over the state.”
It’s not just Utah, either. The Upper Colorado River Basin has also hit a record low. And the West had less snow cover last month than any January in the past 25 years, according to NASA satellite imaging.
One of the most readily visible effects of the snow drought has been later opening dates and fewer trails at the West’s famed ski resorts. But missing out on precious white stuff this winter could create a host of other problems, from stressed water supplies to sickly forests.
It’s bad for Utah’s reservoirs
Utah reservoirs, excluding Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge, are now around two-thirds full. That’s 9 percentage points less than this time last year.
For the past couple of years, the state’s reservoirs have been running below average, Meyer said. While these storage buckets did their job to help communities weather a mostly dry 2025, they aren’t meant to sustain through more than one or two consecutive years of drought.
“They only have a certain amount that they can spend before we start running into bigger issues,” Meyer said. “And we may be on the turning point if we have another year like we did last year, with above-average withdrawals and consumption and below-average inputs and precipitation.”
Without much snow to melt this spring, there would be less water to replenish the reserves.
Having dark, bare ground in the mountains — rather than white, reflective snow cover — could also cause the landscape to warm more quickly in the spring. That means more snowmelt may evaporate before it ever flows downstream to be stored.
It’s bad for city water supplies
Snowpack is essentially the biggest reservoir of all in Utah. In fact, 95% of the state’s water supply depends on melting snow. It’s so vital to the state that Gov. Spencer Cox has again called for Utahns to pray for precipitation.
If the snowpack remains poor, there’s less water to go around once the summer heat hits and farm irrigation season starts.
“It'll be a smaller piece of the pie, and everybody will be fighting for that smaller piece,” Meyer said.
Snow drought is a bit different from the usual version, Meyer said, because an area could be in a snow drought even if it gets rain. That’s been common across Utah’s lower and mid-elevation mountains this winter. With record warm temperatures, a lot of the precipitation that would have historically fallen as snow arrived pre-melted.
Some parts of Utah haven’t even gotten much rain lately, though. Last month was Salt Lake City’s ninth-driest January in records that go back 152 years.
Forecasts for spring runoff continue to nudge downward as winter progresses, Meyer said. So if Utahns draw down the state’s reservoirs this year like they did last year, the state could move closer to using up its supply.
“The tug of war between the supply and the demand is continuing to run a deficit,” Meyer said. “And the tug of war is right now being won — both short-term and long-term — by the demand.”
It’s bad for the Colorado River
While Utah’s reservoirs are in tough shape overall, Lake Powell may be in the worst spot.
The nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, is now just 26% full. Depending on how water gets released from Powell and the Colorado River’s other reservoirs this year, levels could soon dip below the record lows it hit in early 2023.
The latest projections from the Bureau of Reclamation indicate Powell could drop below the reach of its lowest boat access ramp by the end of summer. In a worst-case scenario, it could even pass the point where it can no longer generate hydroelectric power — 3,490 feet above sea level — by the end of 2026.
Powell’s peril illustrates how snow drought could further strain the Colorado River system, which supplies water for 250,000 square miles of Western landscape and around 40 million Americans from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles.
“Anything that needs water in the Colorado River system — in this very arid landscape — is going to suffer in years when we have snow drought that is this pervasive and a snowpack that is this low in the headwaters,” said Celene Hawkins, Colorado River program director with conservation group The Nature Conservancy.
The snow drought’s timing isn’t ideal, either. The dry winter is happening against the backdrop of tense, deadlocked negotiations between Utah and six other states over how to split the shrinking Colorado River.
The dire climatic situation is a double-edged sword, Hawkins said. If the states were meeting during a stellar winter as the West saw in 2023, that might “ease the pressure off the negotiations and keep us from having the conversations that we need to have about how we're going to manage into a drier future.” So, the current situation makes it harder for the negotiators to kick the can down the road.
On the other hand, it also means any new agreement in 2026 will begin with exceptionally high stakes. With reservoir levels so close to critical thresholds, every decision is a pivotal one.
“In some ways, it's a really stark reminder of the challenges,” Hawkins said. “But I hope it's also a catalyst for coming together and doing things that we need to do across the basin in the future.”
It’s bad for plants and wildlife
This dry winter is not an isolated incident. It’s just the latest symptom of a long-term megadrought that has parched the West since the turn of the century. And that is just one sign of our changing climate — which scientists agree is driven by human-caused emissions — that is warming the Earth and making droughts more frequent and intense.
These changes can take a toll on the flora and fauna that depend on desert streams fed by snowpack. That’s especially true with back-to-back dry winters like we’re seeing now, Hawkins said.
One victim of snow drought may be the region’s mountain forests.
“If the snowpack is the big reservoir in the headwaters, the forests are kind of like our water towers,” Hawkins said.
Forests play a key role in how snow is captured and held in mountain headwaters by slowing down the runoff, she said. If trees are healthy and soil is moist, that also reduces an area’s wildfire risk.
When there’s not enough snow, however, trees don’t get enough to drink and are more vulnerable to diseases, pests and other ailments.
Wildlife could feel the effects, too.
If reservoir levels reach critical lows, Hawkins said water managers may not be able to do big releases this spring. Animals living downstream from dams depend on those rushes of water because they simulate how rivers used to flow naturally.
“Fish, wildlife, ecosystems, riparian-dependent species that are in the Colorado River — we can expect that they all might be having a hard time in the 2026 year,” Hawkins said.
While there are still two more months before the typical peak of Utah’s snow season, it’s unclear if things will be able to turn around.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest forecast for February leans toward below-average precipitation for all of Utah. The seasonal outlook for the next couple of months is underwhelming, too.
“We are entering the time of the season where we can have major events” that bring a lot of snow, Meyer said. “But we're running out of runway at this point.”
There is a decent chance for one snow system to move through Utah in the second week of February, he said, but the state would need much more than one storm to play catch-up.
Disclosure: The Nature Conservancy is a financial sponsor of KUER.
