Rivers, Drought, and the 2026 Growing Season

Rivers, Drought, and the 2026 Growing Season

LodiEye — May, 2026

Summary

The 2026 water year has produced the worst spring drought in the modern U.S. record. By mid-May, just over half the country — and more than 60 percent of the Lower 48 — sat in drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Behind the dryness is a single dominant driver across the West: a mountain snowpack that largely failed to arrive, then melted weeks early. This report follows that thread from the high country to the major rivers, into the drought maps of the states those rivers touch, and out to the farm gate, where the costs are now being counted.

Key findings:

• About 50.8 percent of the U.S. and 60.8 percent of the Lower 48 were in drought in late May 2026 — the most extensive spring drought on record.
• Peak snowpack set new all-time lows in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico; California recorded its second-lowest snowpack on record.
• Inflow to Lake Powell on the Colorado River was forecast at roughly 22 percent of average for April through July, with some estimates as low as 13 percent. Powell sat near 23 percent full and Lake Mead near 30 percent — both approaching record lows.
• Of the 30 states bordering six major river systems, 27 were in active drought (moderate or worse).
• Nationally, the USDA estimated about 97 percent of cotton, 87 percent of sorghum, 70 percent of winter wheat, and 63 percent of cattle inventory were located in drought areas.
• In the San Joaquin Valley, Central Valley Project south-of-Delta agricultural deliveries opened at 15 percent of contract (later raised to 25 percent), while the Project's Eastside contractors — including Stockton East Water District — received zero.

The feeder source: a snow year that didn't show up

Across the West, snowpack is the largest natural reservoir there is. The water locked in mountain snow each winter is released slowly through spring and summer, feeding rivers and filling the reservoirs that cities and farms draw on. In 2026 that reservoir came up nearly empty.

According to the National Integrated Drought Information System, peak snow-water equivalent — the amount of liquid water held in the snowpack, usually measured around April 1 — reached new record lows in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, with no comparable year in the monitoring record. In those states, peak snow ran 32 to 53 percent below the previous record lows. California posted its second-lowest April 1 reading. A record-warm March then triggered abrupt, early melting, and many monitoring sites recorded their earliest melt-out dates ever. In much of the interior West, the snow was effectively gone before the spring runoff season had properly begun.

The federal government recorded the period from January through March as the driest on record for the contiguous United States, with overall precipitation below 70 percent of average and March ranking as the warmest in 132 years. The consequence shows up downstream, in the rivers.

From mountains to mainstem: river flows

The clearest signal is in the snow-fed systems. Flow data compiled from U.S. Geological Survey gauges show the Columbia River running at roughly half its normal volume for the season and the Missouri River at about 68 percent of normal. The Colorado River tells the starkest story: the National Weather Service's Colorado Basin River Forecast Center put the April-through-July inflow to Lake Powell at about 22 percent of average, and one forecast-center estimate placed the figure near 13 percent — which would be the lowest on record.

Major river flows as a share of normal, spring 2026

Source: U.S. Geological Survey gauge data and the NWS Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. Colorado figure is the forecast April–July inflow to Lake Powell.

Reservoirs near the edge. By late spring, Lake Powell sat around 23 percent full and Lake Mead around 30 percent full, both approaching record-low elevations. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projected Mead could fall to roughly 1,036 feet during 2026 — below the previous record set in 2022 — and has leaned on emergency measures, including reduced releases and supplemental upstream water, to keep Powell above the level needed to generate hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam.

The Mississippi River shows a split personality that reflects its mixed sources. Near its mouth, where it is sustained by the combined flow of the Ohio, Missouri, and upper-basin tributaries, the river ran close to normal at Vicksburg. Farther upstream at St. Louis it was running roughly 36 percent below normal, dragged down by drought across the middle of the country. Unlike the snow-fed Western rivers, the lower Mississippi basin's problem is rainfall: precipitation deficits stretching back to last summer. A multi-day storm system in late May delivered up to seven inches of rain to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana — real relief, but not enough to erase deficits that deep.

The drought map: states along the rivers

Pooling the states that border six major systems — the Colorado, Rio Grande, Columbia, Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio — yields 30 distinct states. As of the U.S. Drought Monitor's reading for the week of May 19, 2026, 27 of those 30 were in active drought, defined as moderate (D1) intensity or worse. The three exceptions — Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin — were abnormally dry or normal, but not in drought.

The most severe clusters map directly onto the snow story. The Colorado and Rio Grande headwater states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming — sit in severe to extreme drought, as does much of the Missouri basin across the High Plains. The Lower Mississippi states form the other deep pocket, this one rainfall-driven. The clearest outlier runs the other way: California, despite its low snowpack, registered only about 6 percent of its area in active drought, cushioned by reservoir storage carried over from wetter years.

Share of state in active drought (D1 or worse), week of May 19, 2026

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor (NDMC / USDA / NOAA). Selected river-bordering states with published area percentages; some readings are from the first half of May.

Agriculture under pressure

Drought reaches agriculture through two doors: the rain that doesn't fall on rangeland and dryland crops, and the irrigation water that doesn't arrive because the snow that should have fed it never accumulated. In 2026, both doors are open at once.

The USDA's weekly tally of commodities sitting inside drought areas captures the breadth. Nearly all of the nation's cotton and most of its sorghum, rice, and sugarcane were in drought-classified counties; so were about 70 percent of winter wheat and roughly 63 percent of the cattle inventory. These figures describe exposure rather than guaranteed loss, but the exposure is unusually wide.

Share of U.S. commodity located in drought areas (moderate or worse), 2026

Source: USDA World Agricultural Outlook Board, “Agriculture in Drought.” Figures show the percent of each commodity's production or inventory located in D1+ drought.

Wheat and rangeland take the first hit

Winter wheat, which heads out in spring, is the early casualty. USDA crop-progress reporting rated 58 percent of Kansas winter wheat poor to very poor, with 39 percent of the state's pasture and range in the same condition. Oklahoma rated 48 percent of its wheat poor to very poor, and similar stress appeared across Texas, Nebraska, and Colorado. For livestock producers, thin pasture and dwindling stock-water mean earlier reliance on supplemental feed or herd reductions — choices that ripple into cattle markets through the rest of the year.

The strain is visible on individual operations. On the southeastern Colorado plains, a century-old family ranch near Campo cut its planted acreage sharply this spring as the ground stayed bare and dry. Compounding the picture, more than 1.6 million acres had already burned nationally by early 2026 — more than double the ten-year average for the period — adding wildfire risk to the list of pressures on Western and Plains agriculture.

California and the San Joaquin Valley

California sits at an unusual crossroads in this story. Its snowpack was among the worst on record, yet reservoir carryover from recent wet years left the state far less drought-stricken than its neighbors. The result is a water year of sharp contrasts rather than uniform shortage.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's initial 2026 allocations for the Central Valley Project — which serves roughly three million acres of farmland — illustrate the split. Senior San Joaquin River settlement and exchange contractors and the Friant Division's Class 1 users were slated for full deliveries. South-of-Delta municipal users opened at 65 percent. But south-of-Delta agricultural service contractors started at just 15 percent of contract — a figure raised to 20 percent in March and to 25 percent by mid-May as spring runoff was assessed. In San Joaquin County, the Project's Eastside contractors, including Stockton East Water District and the Central San Joaquin Water Conservation District, received a zero-percent allocation.

2026 Central Valley Project and State Water Project allocations, by contractor group

Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation; California Department of Water Resources. South-of-Delta agriculture and State Water Project figures reflect mid-May 2026 updates.

For growers facing a low surface-water allocation, the usual responses are more groundwater pumping, water transfers, or fallowing ground — each of which carries consequences under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and for local farm economies. The initial 15 percent figure drew public criticism from San Joaquin Valley members of Congress, who argued it understated the year's hydrology. The episode is a reminder that in California, water supply is governed as much by storage, senior rights, and Delta operating rules as by any single season's snow.

The outlook

Federal forecasters expect the core of the drought to persist. The seasonal outlook covering late May through August favors continued or intensifying drought across most of the West, with the Colorado and Rio Grande basins judged unlikely to recover meaningfully this season after a snowpack that left so little to work with. Warmer-than-normal temperatures are favored across much of the region, which raises evaporative demand just as supplies tighten.

There are pockets of improvement. Persistent rain has eased conditions from Texas into the Southeast, and the late-May storms brought genuine relief to the Lower Mississippi. For the snow-dependent West, however, meaningful recovery now hinges on factors still months away: the strength and reach of the summer monsoon, and whether next winter restores what this one withheld. For the rivers, the reservoirs, and the farms that depend on both, 2026 is shaping up as a year to manage shortage rather than escape it.

About This Report

LodiEye is the investigative research arm of Lodi411.com, a citizen-run civic data and transparency platform serving Lodi, California and San Joaquin County. LodiEye is not a traditional news outlet. It does not employ professional journalists or reporters, and the people behind it do not hold journalism degrees or have professional newsroom experience. LodiEye is best understood as civic research and analysis — not peer journalism — and is not a substitute for the local and regional news organizations that do this work professionally. For traditional reporting on Lodi, San Joaquin County, and the broader region, readers are encouraged to consult the Lodi News-Sentinel, Stocktonia, The Sacramento Bee, CalMatters, and other established news outlets staffed by credentialed journalists.

This LodiEye report was produced using artificial intelligence tools under the direction and review of the founder. Lodi411 uses multiple AI platforms in its research and publication workflow, including Anthropic's Claude (primarily Opus and Sonnet models) and Perplexity AI across a variety of large language models offered by each. These tools were used in the following capacities:

Source Discovery: AI-assisted search and retrieval located primary data from federal and state agencies — the U.S. Drought Monitor, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the USDA, the U.S. Geological Survey, NIDIS/Drought.gov, and the California Department of Water Resources — alongside supporting reporting. Perplexity AI handled initial source discovery and real-time data retrieval; Claude was used for deeper reading of the identified sources.

Credibility Validation: Claims and figures were cross-referenced across multiple independent sources, prioritizing government datasets (the U.S. Drought Monitor, the Bureau of Reclamation's Colorado River 24-Month Study, and USDA crop reporting) over institutional analysis and news accounts. Multiple AI models independently checked key data points — reservoir elevations, river-flow percentages, and water-allocation figures — and flagged inconsistencies for resolution.

Analysis and Synthesis: Claude Opus and Sonnet assisted in organizing the data into a single causal framework linking the 2026 snowpack shortfall to river flows, state-level drought, and agricultural exposure, and in building the crosswalk of the 30 states bordering the six major river systems.

Presentation: Claude assisted in drafting, structuring, and formatting the report, including the narrative framing and the four KendoUI data visualizations covering river flows, state drought extent, commodity exposure, and Central Valley Project allocations.

Final Review: Multiple AI models reviewed the completed draft for factual consistency, source-attribution accuracy, logical coherence, and balanced presentation. All editorial judgments, analytical conclusions, and publication decisions were made by the human editor.

Lodi411/LodiEye believes transparency about AI use serves both readers and the broader information ecosystem. Readers who spot errors are encouraged to write editor@lodi411.com so corrections can be made.

References

• U.S. Drought Monitor — National Drought Mitigation Center (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), USDA, and NOAA.
• National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) / Drought.gov — Western snow drought status updates and seasonal outlooks.
• U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — Colorado River 24-Month Studies and Central Valley Project 2026 allocations.
• NWS Colorado Basin River Forecast Center — Lake Powell inflow forecasts.
• U.S. Geological Survey WaterWatch — streamflow gauge data.
• U.S. Department of Agriculture — Crop Progress reports and the World Agricultural Outlook Board's “Agriculture in Drought” summary.
• California Department of Water Resources — Sierra Nevada snow surveys and reservoir storage.