The Utility of Operationally Neutral and Flexible Conservation Pools in the Colorado River Basin

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Nota bene: A guest post from friends of Inkstain John Berggren and Kevin Wheeler

John Berggren (Regional Policy Manager, Western Resource Advocates)

Kevin Wheeler (Principle, Water Balance Consulting)

5/5/2026

As everyone is well aware, the snowpack and associated runoff this year are truly awful. It will be one of the worst, if not worst, on record. The Bureau of Reclamation is using unprecedented policy levers to keep Lake Powell from reaching levels so low that the safety of the dam may come into question. And it is unclear if those policy levers will be enough, especially if the rest of the spring and summer are warm and dry. This got us thinking—are there other tools in the toolbox we are not considering?

While current guidelines may not contain much else, you only have to look as far as Reclamation’s Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement to see there are options being proposed. We explore how one of those—flexible and operationally neutral conservation pools—can actually provide system protection without the political, legal, and hydrological risk that comes with currently available options. The current Intentionally Created Surplus program in the Lower Basin is an excellent framework to explore how conserved water can be creatively moved between reservoirs, wherever it is needed most.

No need for new infrastructure, complicated agreements, or shifting of risk—just smart reservoir accounting and operations. We hope this level of flexibility and creativity is being considered in new Post-2026 Guidelines and in the Basin State’s negotiations.

Water Year 2026 Challenges

The Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month study indicates that under the ‘most probable’ scenario, Lake Powell will fall below 3,500 ft by August of this year if no further action is taken. Reclamation has indicated, however, they intend to plan for the ‘minimum probable’ scenario which has the reservoir crossing this critical threshold in July. In response, Reclamation will be releasing additional water from the Upper Initial Units (UIU) under the 2019 Drought Response Operations Agreement (DROA) in the range of 660 kaf to 1 maf. Reclamation has indicated these releases would come from Flaming Gorge and will help keep Lake Powell from dropping to critical levels.

Concurrently, Reclamation has announced they intend to reduce Lake Powell releases from 7.48 maf to 6 maf during Water Year 2026 under Section 6E of the 2024 Record of Decision from the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines (SEIS). Reducing Powell releases has implications for elevations in Lake Mead as well as significant Compact implications. In the absence of any operational adaptations, the 10-year cumulative flow at Lee Ferry will fall to 82.7 maf by the end of the current water year. If releases are reduced to 6 maf and 1.48 maf of water is withheld in Lake Powell between April and September 2026, as is currently planned, the 10-year cumulative flow will be approximately 81.2 maf (Figure 1). This would risk triggering legal action by the Lower Basin.

Figure 1. Lee Ferry Cumulative 10-year Flow. The blue line shows the estimated decline of the cumulative 10-year Lee Ferry flow before any adjustments and the orange line shows an accelerated decline following a 1.48 maf reduction to Lake Powell releases made under 6E SEIS authorities.

Despite this immediate legal risk, Reclamation’s modeling demonstrates that both mechanisms will be required to protect Lake Powell this year, but just barely. Under ‘minimum probable’ hydrology, these actions would still result in Lake Powell dropping to 3,500 ft —dangerously close the hydropower intakes.

The Upper Basin has reluctantly accepted the proposed DROA releases which will significantly impact Flaming Gorge, but harbors significant concerns over whether water releases from the UIUs will be used to benefit the Lower Basin and how storage of the UIU reservoirs will be recovered. Similarly, the Lower Basin has issues with the reduction of Lake Powell releases to 6 maf, citing concerns over violations of the Compact and suggesting that more water should be released from the UIUs. Neither Basin is happy with Reclamation’s response to the dire hydrology this water year.

How could Water Year 2026 have been different?

The challenges discussed above present an opportunity to examine exactly how a primary tool developed for several of the alternatives in the Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) — operationally neutral and flexible conservation pools — could provide another means to handle extremely dry years. While current guidelines do not allow for this flexibility, Water Year 2026 does provide a concrete example for how moving conservation pool water could mitigate low runoff years and protect critical infrastructure without many of the challenges discussed above. In this hypothetical, we demonstrate how if conserved water currently stored in Lake Mead were to be treated as an operationally neutral conservation pool with flexibility in where it is located, Reclamation could more easily protect Lake Powell.

As of EOY 2024 (the most recent Reclamation Colorado River Accounting and Water User Report), there was 3.32 maf of conserved water, called Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS), being stored in Lake Mead. If this current conserved volume would be considered operationally neutral, as in some of the proposals in the DEIS alternatives, then Reclamation could move a portion of this conserved water up to Lake Powell. ICS water can be “moved” to Lake Powell by reducing releases from Glen Canyon Dam. Importantly, though, these reductions in Powell releases would not occur under the 2024 SEIS 6E authority and therefore would have no impact on Compact compliance.

In the current case, the proposed 1.48 maf reduction of releases from Lake Powell could be considered a transfer of ICS water from Lake Mead to Lake Powell. The reduction of releases would be added to the physical volume crossing the Lee Ferry Compact point, as though 7.48 maf were released from Powell, even though only 6 maf were physically released, so there would be no risk of a compact violation. That water would help to prevent Lake Powell from reaching critical elevation levels but would remain under the ownership of the Lower Basin contributors. Similarly, instead of needing to release 1 maf from Flaming Gorge, Reclamation could release only 500 kaf from the UIUs as part of DROA, and move an additional 500 kaf of ICS water up to Lake Powell by making a physical release of 5.5 maf for Water Year 2026 from Lake Powell (again, as though 7.48 maf were released). This would keep more water in Flaming Gorge which serves as a potential buffer if Water Year 2027 is similarly dry.

Figure 2. Options for Protecting the Elevation of Lake Powell. Under the minimum probable hydrologic condition from the April 24-month study, the orange line shows combinations of contributions from Upper Initial Units (UIUs) and Water Year 2026 releases from Lake Powell to maintain 3,500 ft elevation. The blue line shows the resulting minimum elevation of Lake Mead during Water Year 2026 on the right axis.

As shown in Figure 2, several options exist to maintain Lake Powell at 3,500 ft during the projected lowest month of March 2027. The options towards the left side of the graph indicate lower releases from UIUs and reduced releases from Lake Powell (i.e. increases in release reductions relative to the initially assumed release of 7.48 maf). The options on the right side of the graph rely on larger contributions from UIUs and greater releases from Lake Powell (i.e., smaller release reductions).

What if additional water is needed later in Water Year 2026?

Concerningly, the minimum probable hydrology is not the worst-case scenario and therefore additional flexibility may be required. The April to July runoff of Water Year 2026 is tracking very closely to Water Year 2002, which then resulted in the historically lowest inflow to Lake Powell. With the starting elevation today over 120 ft lower than it was in 2002, such a sharp decline would have far worse implications for Lake Powell. Using both levers to the extent currently planned may not be enough to keep Lake Powell at a safe elevation. Building upon the April 24-month study, if April to September inflow is equivalent to 2002, the “hole” in Lake Powell that Reclamation would need to fill might require an additional 530 kaf from currently projected volumes to maintain Lake Powell at 3,500 ft. To fill this hole, Reclamation may need to release additional water from the UIUs, but that presents significant physical risks because we cannot be certain what 2027 will be like and that would certainly face significant Upper Basin opposition. On the other hand, additional reductions from Lake Powell below 6.0 maf faces mounting legal risks, including exceeding Reclamation’s authorities under the SEIS and further exacerbating Compact concerns along with Lower Basin opposition. Having the flexibility to, again, pull from an operationally neutral conservation pool to respond to changing conditions and fill the inherently uncertain hole, provides a solution that avoids many of the legal, hydrologic, and political uncertainties.

What happens to Lake Mead?

The other benefit to having a flexible conservation pool is not just in the short term to move water up to protect Powell, but in the medium term as it provides the mechanism to move that water back down in future years. The water might have been needed in Water Year 2026 to protect Powell, but in Water Year 2027 it could be moved back down to Mead, depending on system conditions and priorities. Reducing Powell releases under Reclamation’s 6E authority provides no similar mechanism to recover that water in Mead in future years.

What if Water Year 2027 is dry?

In the absence of institutional barriers, prudent extended drought management operations in a generalized multi-reservoir context suggest keeping as much water as possible higher in the system, bringing water down only when it is needed. This approach keeps more options open for unknown future conditions. Furthermore, it minimizes evaporative losses due to cooler temperatures at higher elevations. In the context of the current Colorado River crisis, this would equate to minimizing additional releases from the UIUs while maximizing the use of adaptions to releases from Lake Powell, but only to the extent possible without impairing the operations of Lake Mead. If this mechanism were possible, more water could be retained in the UIUs while less water is released from Lake Powell. This approach increases the overall system protection if Water Year 2027 were to be dry.

“Birding Toward Hope”

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Tucker Davidson of Audubon wrote a lovely piece about slowing down and listening to, and looking for, the birds:

Birding requires us to be present in the moment. It also allows us to shift our focus from our own worries and ruminations to another subject, breaking anxious thought patterns. Birds hold our attention without overwhelming it. For the socially awkward like myself, birding can provide deep enrichment without the anxiety-inducing obligation of socializing.

Rin and I had a blast last month talking about all this with Tucker on our Water Matters podcast.

Quoting Sonya Ziaja

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Think of law as software. State agency budgets and staff are hardware. We have been stripping the copper for the past forty years, making software updates questionably useful, without durable fixes to the hardware. For constitutional environmental rights to make a difference, state natural resource departments need to be adequately funded and staffed.


– Sonya Ziaja, University of Baltimore School of Law, from an excellent new empirically grounded paper on the disconnect between environmental and natural resource laws as they are written and their real impacts on the ground.

Quoting Emily Drabinski on libraries

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Often we are the only indoor public space in our communities and provide the only accessible public bathroom. We provide broadband internet to people who can’t access it otherwise, and assistance with the email addresses and online forms required to access public welfare programs. Extreme poverty, unaddressed mental illness, the opioid crisis?—?all of it walks through our doors and makes itself at home.

– Emily Drabinski, The Library is a Commons

Every Pixel Tells a Story

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Screenshot of a Google Earth App showing red areas of Albuquerque where water use has gone down and blue where it has gone up.

Every pixel tells a story.

I’ve been learning over the last few months how to make better use of the cornucopia of remote sensing data, satellites flying overhead snapping our picture, Instagram writ large. It offers a helpful reframing of my thinking about how water is spread across the landscape of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley.

Sometimes we do it with intentionality and purpose, turning a farm field into a shopping center, running municipal lines to a new neighborhood, or abandoning an old one. (Yes, the latter has happened.) Sometimes the landscape grabs water on its own, trees dipping their roots into the shallow aquifer on the valley floor. Sometimes we do it because we value the green. Sometimes the change in green is just a side effect, water stuff just happens. Sometimes the satellite data helps answer questions. Mostly right now, for me, it suggests new questions to which I don’t know the answers.

Consider the map above. I’ve been staring at it for the last week in QGIS, the mapping software on my laptop. I built a Google Earth Engine app so you can stare at it too.

NASA’s Landsat satellites have been flying around snapping our pictures since the early ’70s, and with enough resolution beginning in the mid-’80s to begin seriously looking at the questions I’m interested in. The image above draws on algorithmic magic that creates an enhanced vegetation index showing which of the little pixels are vegetate – the thing we do with our consumptive use of water, making our desert landscape green. For the map above, I’ve colored each pixel to show the vegetation trend over time – blue ones have gotten more vegetated (by implication using more water), red ones have gotten less vegetated.

The map is full of “duh” moments – neighborhoods built since the 1980s are blue, as we turn desert into homes with trees and gardens, cars out front and kids’ basketball hoops in the cul-de-sacs. The former Kirtland Air Force neighborhoods along the northern edge of the base light up red. No more cul-de-sacs and basketball hoops, no more trees. The old farms of the South Valley that are no longer irrigated show up as big irregular red patches – Valle de Oro the most prominent, but the old Tobacco Farms property that’s now a Walmart, and the east side south valley farms that are now light industrial – red as well.

The riverside woods are largely greener, a riparian bosque flourishing after the combination of levees and an upstream flood control dam enabled our beloved forest to become what it is today. Except where it isn’t – the bits of red sprinkled through the bosque raise fresh questions.

The mix of blue and red on the valley floor tells a rich story – the expansion of the leafy village life of Corrales and Los Ranchos de Albuquerque as residents optimize around its mix of ditch water and unmetered domestic wells (and city water in Los Ranchos) while parcels farmed and irrigated decline. We’ve been looking at these patterns in bulk census data for years. The satellites let us see them, pixel by pixel, on the landscape.

Albuquerque’s near Northeast Heights, where I live, is fascinating. All that red! I could tell a simple just-so-story about municipal water conservation efforts that took hold in the mid-1990s, xeric gardens like mine. But it might be something as simple as a pattern of senescence of neighborhood trees build during the post-war boom of the 1950s. Maybe both? Tearing out lawns – the lawns from which they got water – dooming our aging trees?

There’s a big red pixel across the street from my house where our neighbor’s magnificent old cottonwood is no more.

There’s some sciency work going on behind all this, as my UNM colleagues and I turn toward bulk numbers and trends, trying to step away from the flattened landscape suggested by water agency numbers to the richer picture the remote sensing data offers of where the water is actually going in this coupled human-natural system, what we do with it, what we actually have reason to value.

But I also love the little stories. Every pixel tells a story.

A note on methods

The conceptual work – choice of methods, experimental design, iteration over various options of time periods, geographies, and remote sensing tools – is mine, with help from some of our smart students who have been teaching me about this remote sensing stuff for years. I use Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex for the software engineering. They are way better at writing code than I am. Most of the resulting code runs on Google Earth Engine, which supports my academic work with a generous free account.

In posting this publicly, a) I’m reasonably confident of what I’ve got, and b) I bear responsibility for the results.

More on 2026 US wheat acreage

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Monochrome line chart of U.S. planted acreage for corn, soybeans, and wheat, 1919-2026. Wheat is the solid black line and declines over the long run to about 43.8 million acres in 2026; soybeans, shown as a dotted gray line, rise to about 84.7 million acres; corn, shown as a dashed light-gray line, remains highest at about 95.3 million acres.

The rise of soy.

It’s always more interesting than I think!

After this morning’s quickie “wheat acreage lowest since 1919” post, I dusted off my USDA NASS data skills (I used to work with that data a lot, but it’s been ages).

Why 1919?

1919, it turns out, was when USDA’s US wheat acreage record starts! So really what we’re saying is “the lowest acreage as far back as the data goes.” Wheat’s been in a long decline since the early ’80s.

What was happening in 1919?

US wheat acreage exploded during WWI because Europeans were using their farmland to kill one another rather than grow food, and we stepped in to fill the gap.

2026 is stuff happening at the margin

While “lowest since 1919” sounds dramatic (hence my clickbaity morning post), in fact the squiggles on the graph show stuff happening at the margin: wheat down a little bit, but enough for the clickbait, corn also down a little but, soy up a little bit.

It’s a city book

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Black and white photograph of a library with "library" sign and a street beyond

My beloved International District Library

A friend who has been part of the Ribbons of Green brain trust for the last six years reminded me over a taco truck library bench lunch today about the expectations I confront as the book emerges in the next six weeks into public view.

It’s not a water book. It’s a city book.

I mention the taco truck library bench lunch deliberately, because that is a city sort of a story – riding our bikes through the International District to check out the new park going in next to the library, then south to the taco truck in the lot next to the union hall, then zigging and zagging past a closed park to find a shady bench in front of the library on which to sit.

I’ve had the crud for nearly a month, and barely been on the bike at all, which is a striking break with my life’s rhythm. The problem with the break is not mainly the exercise, though not exercising when your body’s used to exercising is a problem. It’s the pattern of moving through my city on two wheels. It’s my practice, a city thing.

In the preface to Ribbons of Green, Bob Berrens and I frame the reasons we wrote this book the way we did:

Cities are one of humanity’s great inventions. People come together to share the social and economic benefits that flow from acting collectively at ever-larger scales. They are a tool for what the Bengali-born, Nobel Prize–winning economist and ethical philosopher Amartya Sen calls “capabilities”—the conditions that enable people to achieve what they have reason to value. Things like roads, food supply systems, and schools provide those collective capabilities, and all of them are enabled when people gather and share the cost of delivering them and the responsibility of guiding them toward the community’s desired future.

Our city shares an economic fabric that enables taco trucks (our red barbacoa truck, Zuni and San Pedro, was hoppin’ on a late Sunday morning) and a fabric of public goods that includes a really great library system (this was a two-library bike ride) and more deeply the vibrant cluster of humanity that is the International District on a cool spring Sunday.

There’s a weird naming convention in journalism, the “city desk,” the group of reporters who cover, well, the city. That’s where my roots are as a writer, a youngster at the late lamented Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the last of L.A.’s gritty tabloids, a summer of unhappy chaos trying to make sense of a city in the midst of a crack epidemic and the Night Stalker and a food poisoning epidemic involving Jalisco cheese. I was there, working a late shift on the Herald-Examiner’s city desk, when we bestowed the name “the Night Stalker” on the serial killer terrorizing LA that summer. I was reading John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion and imagining becoming the gritty chronicler of city life and failing terribly, lordy was I miserable, because I didn’t know the right questions. But it got me started on this other set of questions – the Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs and Edward Glaeser questions, the wonky frame around city life, to which I have happily returned.

To my water audience, I promise you’ll find lots of water stuff in Ribbons of Green. But its importance to our narrative is collective action around water as a means to the end of making a city, and to the big messy shared project of what we would like our city to become.

The park we had to bypass in search of a place to sit and eat tacos was all locked up, a response to encampments. I was pissed. My friend, Socratically wise in the ways of cities and knowing what was coming as I checked each of the park’s gates before stopping my bike and uttering an annoyed “What the fuck?”, just laughed. At both of today’s libraries, we saw city security people, even though both were closed. Cities are complicated, no one thing, ever in tension between competing and conflicting goals and values.

That’s what makes writing about them so interesting.

The Bard

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Neil Innes’s bard in Holy Grail is one of my favorite film characters.

Bravely Bold Sir Robin, rode forth from Camelot

He was not afraid to die, O’ Brave Sir Robin!

He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways

Brave, Brave, Brave, Brave Sir Robin

He was not the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp,

Or to have his eyes gouged out, and his elbows broken!

To have his knee caps split, and his body burned away!

Innes, who wrote the song, goes on, but you get the point. Sir Robin was brave. It’s a little over the top, but that’s the point! To be fair, “over the top” is the point of the whole film, but in this particular case Innes’s bard is playing a role – to not only document, but to support and encourage Sir Robin’s bravery.

But then, you know, three-headed giant knight stuff happens. The bard keeps trying to sing hero stuff – the “ought” in moral philosophy’s “is/ought” dichotomy – and Robin glares nervously and tries to shut him down.

And then Sir Robin – we’ll let Innes tell it:

Bard: Brave Sir Robin Ran Away!

Sir Robin: “NO!”

Bard: Bravely Ran Away Away!

Sir Robin: “I didn’t!”

Bard: When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled!

Sir Robin: “I never!”

Bard: Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about, And gallantly, he chickened out!

Whether Sir Robin should have stayed and fought the three-headed giant knight is beside the point. I never wanted to be Sir Robin. I wanted to be the bard. But the “is/ought” dichotomy is tough terrain. There is danger when the bard thinks they know what ought to be done.

A Freakish Heat Wave – A Statistical Wonder

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Graph showing distribution of seven-day heat waves in Albuquerque, with the current one, at 26F, far greater than anything in history.

A freakish heat wave across

Words fall short as we watch the West’s snowpack disappear under the glare of a heat wave so off-the-charts, so freakish, that I had to resort to some pretty extreme math to try to understand how freakishly off-the-charts this is.

We’ve got more than a century of weather records in Albuquerque, with really good ones going back to the 1930s, and no seven day period, anywhere in the year, has come anywhere close to what we’re in the middle of. Based on the National Weather Service’s current forecast, the seven days from March 19 to 25 will be ~28F above average. In statistics nerd terms, that is more than 4 standard deviations outside the norm.

I’m on statistical thin ice here because we’re so far out on the tail of the distribution that we don’t really know what the statistical distribution of events like this is, but maybe once every 300 years – not for March, but for any time of the year. Maybe once in a very a lot more than that years.

The graph above, based on NWS data going back to the 1930s, is the most useful visualization I could come up with.

A note on methods

When I worked at the newspaper, I had a practice of hunting out weird weather data to turn into a story – the hottest this, the coldest that, the wettest, the driest. Weather data is so rich that you can slice it up a million different ways to come up with some extreme that was easy to sell to an editor.

This practice started with hanging around with National Weather Service forecasters in the pre-everything-is-on-the-Internet days, and then evolved with a bunch of crude tools for looking stuff up myself. It was a happy day for me when xmACIS moved from behind the Weather Service’s firewalls and into public view. I would use spreadsheets and learned to write R code and use government agency APIs to fuel my curiosity.

The tools available now for data access and analysis are amazing, and leaping ahead fast. My old pal Luis Villa from my Linux hacker days, now a lawyer and member of the OpenET board, has been talking a lot lately (I couldn’t find a blog post, a lot of this happens on Mastodon, which is the only social media I spend much time on any more) about the ways in which LLM coding tools can help unlock the power of open data.

I can sit there with my laptop in the evening and code up a tool to look at OpenET data on water use in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley in a way that simply wouldn’t have been tractable in the before times. I have a decent understanding of the data, but I’m a lousy programmer, and the friction of writing code left a bunch of problems that I clearly understood – I know where the data lives, I know the kind of analysis I’d like to see done – out of reach. Now, I upload the job to Google Earth Engine (free for academics!), cook dinner, download the results, and stare mesmerized at the maps. The epistemological ice is thin under me as I look at the results, but that’s the way I’ve always worked. Out where the ice is thin is where things are interesting.