Here is the link to my original interactive visualization that is updated daily

After making my California Reservoirs dashboard marimekko graph, I decided to make a similar Colorado river reservoir page. The Lower Colorado water is used in Southern California and Arizona.

The area of each rectangle shows the total volume of the reservoir in thousands of acre feet (kaf). The blue section shows how much of the capacity is full. You can see the two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are not in good shape relative to their normal historical levels.

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Data Sources and ToolsThe data on water storage comes from the US Bureau of Reclamation's Lower Colorado River Water Operations website. Historical reservoir levels comes from the water-data.com website. Python is used to extract the data and wrangle the data in to a clean format, using the Pandas data analysis library. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the D3.js visualization library.

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What sucks for Cali is we are getting historic level rain but we could still be facing shortages since our waters come from up north. Time to build our own damns.

0/10 stars for the presentation. Can’t even see the y-axis.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

It will be good to see the reservoir levels when the snow melts.

I'm a little confused by this phrasing. Are you saying you get your water from up north as in the colorado river or up north as in the northern half of california? If you are talking about northern california then don't worry we have been getting dumped on as well. Take a look at the Sierra snowpack or some of our reservoir levels compared to last year.

No north as is Colorado River. About 1/3 Southern California water supply comes from Colorado River Aqueduct. Northern Cali might not be as reliant on Colorado.

I'm guessing they're from SoCal. Their water comes from both NorCal and Colorado River, so unless both sources have sufficient water, SoCal can have shortages.

I’d suggest “Current Level” makes much more sense than “Filled”…

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SF water comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir near Yosemite.

What are the units for y axis? Acre-foot?

Dang mole people got thirsty

This is a very well designed chart. one can clearly see the reservoir levels as well as the overall storage sizes. The only weak spot are the two smallest reservoirs on the chart, for which the names are missing. :-/

What are the bottom two reservoirs on the graph? I’m probably supplied by one or both.

Thousands of acre feet.

Blue Mesa and Lake Havasu

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You mean that the axis ends at 64 milion acre-feet?

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Northern Cal doesn't use any Colorado Basin water.

Southern Cal gets its water from Owens Valley via the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Colorado River via the Colorado River Aqueduct and the All-American Canal.

California withdrawals about 4.4 million acre feet (1.4 trillion gallons) from the Colorado River Annually.

Currently snow pack in the Colorado River Basin is about 1.5x the 30 yr average, but that average is pulled down because the last 23 years have been in an epically historic drought.

It will be one of the better years in the last 30, but it's probably not going to be much more than what we use in any given year.

In 1921 we divied up the river assuming an average flow of 16.5 million acre feet. We've since calculated the average from the last 2000 years as about 14.5. The last 20 have averaged about 12.5.

Of that 16.5, california was awarded 4.4. California's plan to reconcile the over allocation is basically to throw up the middle finger and let the courts sort it out. The other six states came up with a plan that asks California to take a cut, but a much smaller cut than any other state.

Worst case scenario California has to give up about 1 million acre feet. Mostly likely scenario California looses 600k-800k (14%-18%ish).

Keep in minde most of that water goes to agriculture. Cites don't use that much.

To make up for the lost water; about 150k-300k could be saved from improving evaporation and leak issues in the canels system. Another few hundred by more efficient agricultural use. And another 100-150 from desalination.

Bottom line:

Don't get too worried about it. Media has a lot of doom and gloom. We deserve some shame for ignoring the issue we've known about for 50 years. In the end you'll just have to pay more for water and deal with politicians grand standing about lawns and pools.