Colorado Snowpack: Water in the Snow, Station by Station

Around April 14, taking the middle of the 105 Colorado stations that publish a median peak date. That is a median of medians and no single basin hits it: across the state those station level peak dates run from March 6 to May 11, which is 66 days of spread inside one state, driven almost entirely by elevation and aspect. The typical melt out across the same stations is May 27. All of these are medians drawn from roughly four decades of record and none of them is a statement about this year.

118 active stations, of which 105 carry a 1991 to 2020 normal for a given calendar day and can therefore be given a percent of normal at all. They sit across 34 counties and 10 river basins, at elevations from 8,240 to 11,680 feet with a middle around 10,275. The highest is Elwood Pass at 11,680 feet. Every figure on this page states which of those two counts it was computed from.

In water rather than in depth, the middle Colorado station typically peaks at about 16.4 inches of water, and the deepest, Tower at 10,610 feet, typically peaks at 49 inches. Nationally the range across the 12 covered states runs from 6.7 inches in Arizona to 32 in Washington. A station’s own median is far more useful than a state one, which is why the table on this page gives every station its own.

Colorado is a headwaters state and almost nothing flows into it. That makes its stations unusually legible: what a Colorado gauge measures in April is, within a few weeks, water in the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Arkansas or the Platte, and there is no upstream reservoir smoothing it first. The basins on this page are the six digit hydrologic units the federal station records carry, named from the United States Geological Survey boundary dataset, and the largest of them by station count is Colorado Headwaters.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service publishes seasonal runoff volume forecasts for 80 forecast points in Colorado, and NOAA Colorado Basin River Forecast Center publishes river forecasts; both are linked from this page. What this page shows from that programme is the completed 2026 water year record, in the past tense, with the issue date printed on every number, so you can see how a forecast moved across a season. On Colorado R nr Cameo, the fifty percent forecast went from 1470 to 820 thousand acre feet between the January 1 and April 1 issues, against a normal of 2210. For the current forecast, go to the agency.

No. Snowpack is one input to that question and this page publishes the input. The others are how dry the soil was before the snow fell, how fast the spring warms, whether rain falls on the snow, and how much dust settles on the surface and darkens it. Two identical Colorado snowpacks in two different years can deliver very different amounts of water for those reasons, which is precisely why the agency issues its runoff forecast monthly and revises it, as the 2026 arcs further down this page show rather than computing it once from a snow number. For Colorado drought conditions themselves, the United States Drought Monitor is the published record and it is a different measurement from this one.

Two reasons, and the page distinguishes them. 13 of the 118 Colorado stations have no 1991 to 2020 median at all, almost always because they were installed too recently to have thirty years behind them, and a station with no normal cannot be a percentage of one. Separately, a station reporting exactly zero water against a normal of an inch or more is held out, because in this network that pattern is usually a failed sensor. Measured against the agency’s own quality flags for March 15, 2026, that rule held out 4 Colorado stations and the agency had independently flagged 4 of them as not valid.

On elevation, Colorado’s middle station sits at 10,275 feet against 10,275 in Colorado and 1,345 in Alaska, and elevation is not a proxy for depth: the deepest packs in the country sit on some of the lowest stations, because a maritime climate delivers far more water per storm. On timing, Colorado peaks around April 14 against March 2 in Arizona and April 20 in Montana. The hub page puts all 12 side by side.