Lake Powell Still Shrinking – The Second Largest Reservoir in the US at Lowest Level Ever



The second-largest reservoir in the country, Lake Powell, is currently at its lowest elevation since it was filled in the middle of the 1960s. The aerial perspective is depressing.

Lake Powell, a crucial part of the western U.S. water supply, is currently only 26 percent full. Since 1967, this is the lowest point. The lake's surface had a water elevation of 3,533.3 feet on August 22, 2022. More than 166 feet lower than "full pool" (elevation 3,700 feet).

Parts of Lake Powell are visible in the natural-color satellite photos on this page, taken by the Landsat spacecraft in the summers of 2017 and 2022. The photos from 2017 were taken by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8, while those from 2022 were taken by the Operational Land Imager-2 on Landsat 9. Southeast Utah and northeastern Arizona share a boundary with Lake Powell; the majority of the area depicted is in Utah. Visit the Earth Observatory feature World of Change: Water Level in Lake Powell for a year-by-year look.

The photographs from August 2017 were picked because they show one of the greatest water levels over the previous ten years. The lake's water level was 3,633.04 feet when measured at Glen Canyon Dam on August 16, 2017. It was 98 feet lower on August 6, 2022, at 3,535.38 feet. The water levels at the dam since 1980, when Lake Powell was almost full, are depicted in the animated line plot below. The "minimum power pool elevation" is denoted by the red line. The dam's hydroelectric turbines can no longer produce energy efficiently below that water level.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and other organizations administer the Colorado River watershed to supply water and electricity to almost 40 million people. It also comprises 4 to 5 million acres of agriculture in the Southwest, most notably the cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Laws like the Colorado River Compact from 1922 allocate river water to states (including tribal areas) and Mexico.

On August 22, Lake Mead, which is downstream from Lake Powell, had water storage at only 28 percent of its maximum level, and the entire Colorado river system had only 34 percent. At the same period, nine western states experienced some amount of drought that affected about 86 percent of the region's land area. The U.S. Drought Monitor's data from August 16 supports this.

After three years of severe drought and two decades of ongoing drought in the American Southwest, federal water managers have been compelled to cut the quantity of water that will be distributed to states near the Colorado River watershed in the 2023 water year. Arizona will receive 21% less water from the Colorado River system next year, Nevada will receive 8% less, and Mexico will receive 7% less, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced on August 16.

According to modeling predictions for August 2022, USBR anticipates Lake Powell's total inflows to be only 62% of the annual normal. By January 1, 2023, Lake Powell's levels may fall to around 3,522 feet, according to hydrologists' predictions.

USBR stated that "two different urgent drought response actions...will assist prop up Lake Powell by approximately 1 million acre-feet of water...through April 2023" in a status report for Glen Canyon Dam dated August 16. Less water will be discharged downstream and more water will enter Lake Powell from reservoirs upstream in order to safeguard it. More specifically, there will be a change in the amount of water released from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which is roughly 455 river miles upstream of Lake Powell.

Joshua Stevens created NASA Earth Observatory photos using data from the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat satellite and the Bureau of Reclamation's database of lake elevations.

By MICHAEL CARLOWICZ, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY 

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