Why the drought will not break easily
The long dry spell across the south-western United States may last longer than current climate models suggest, according to new research covered in the 1 October issue of Science News. The work, co-authored by climate scientist Victoria Todd of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, examined how past droughts came to an end and how that compares with the present event.
The finding is that models may underestimate how long a megadrought can persist once soils and vegetation have dried out, because those feedbacks are hard to capture. In simple terms, a dry landscape tends to stay dry: less moisture evaporates, clouds form less often, and the rain that does fall is absorbed before it reaches rivers.
Tree-ring records show the region has seen multi-decade dry periods before, including events in the 1200s and the 1500s. The current dry spell is already among the driest in more than a thousand years on those reconstructions.
Pressure on the Colorado River
The Colorado River basin is the sharpest example. A ten-year federal blueprint calls for water cuts of up to 40% for California, Arizona and Nevada. The April 2026 Arizona Water Supply Outlook Report from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service showed another weak snowpack year, and reservoir levels have been the subject of repeated emergency talks among the seven basin states.
What cities can do
Water managers are combining several responses: cutting agricultural allocations, paying farmers to leave fields fallow, lining and covering canals, reusing treated water and setting stricter household limits. Cities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles have brought demand down over years while their populations grew, which shows consumption is not fixed.
The harder question is timing. If the drought runs another decade, short-term deals will not be enough and the basin may need a permanent reallocation of supply. Farmers, tribes and urban districts are all part of that negotiation, and none of them wants to be the one that gives up the most.