“It’s pretty bad and looks like runoff is going to be terrible,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research for the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

But the situation appeared similarly bleak at this point in 2015, she said.

“Then we had that weird miracle May,” she said. “Snowpack was awful, but then for some reason there was a ton of rain. Weird things can happen, so let’s hope weird things happen. Otherwise it’s going to be pretty awful.”

A crisis is brewing in rural Arizona communities, and without action, they may be at a point of no return. According to a recent study by Arizona State University, covered by ABC News, groundwater in the Colorado River Basin has been depleting rapidly over the past decade. 

"Much of that groundwater is irreplaceable," lead researcher and Arizona State University Professor Jay Famiglietti said.

What the 1922 compact means is the "crux" of the ongoing fight over the river, said Kathryn Sorensen, a researcher for Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy.

The Lower Basin states interpret the compact to mean the Upper Basin states must deliver the 82.5 million acre-feet over a decade, even if the Upper Basin states have to curtail their water uses to meet that target, she said.

The Upper Basin states believe that because they're not using their total 7.5 million acre-foot allocation of river water every year, it's not their responsibility to ensure that much water reaches the Lower Basin, Sorensen said.

About 36% of the water we use here in Arizona comes from the Colorado River. So why are negotiations taking so long? Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU, told Arizona’s Family the upper basin and lower basin states disagree about how to share the cuts, and Arizona has already taken steep ones.

The transfer basins have been designated now for 35 years. Some cities have made investments or look to those areas as their future water supply if there are deep cuts to Colorado River water, said Sarah Porter, director of ASU's Kyl Center for Water Policy, in a Q&A for the university. "Eliminating or redefining transportation basins would potentially be disruptive to those plans."

In the absence of any deal, costly litigation could prove detrimental for everyone. In a different CRWUA panel, Sarah Porter, director of Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, said the average length of Colorado River litigation in the 20th century was about eight years.

"Our goal is to treat wastewater and at the same time producing more fresh water from different industrial wastewater," said Tiezheng Tong, an associate professor of Environmental Engineering at ASU.

He and colleague Shahnawaz Sinha, an associate research professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at ASU, told The Show more about their work.

ASU graduate students will use the data to figure out how much water will come into the Salt River Basin.

“ASU students are putting together a hydrological model that’s going to use the snow data to improve the forecast of water into the reservoir system,” ASU hydrology professor Enrique Vivoni told KTAR News.

At CWAG’s February 14 presentation, Guest Speaker Kathryn Sorensen, Ph.D. will provide a broader perspective on the water issues introduced at our Annual Member Meeting in January. Dr. Sorensen will discuss regional water management planning concepts, water conservation issues, aquifer level monitoring, Verde River flow, the Big Chino pipeline, and how “paper water” facilitates population growth, among other topics.

Enrique Vivoni, an ASU water scientist who is working on the project, said it may be difficult to map snow in Arizona compared to other snow-laden states around the Mountain West such as California, Wyoming or Colorado.

“Arizona has thin snow that lasts shorter durations,” he said. “It's actually harder to map snow in Arizona than in these other places.”