Kathryn Sorensen, report author and research director at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, said the report is a sign that water managers could be in for some tough choices.

While she agreed with her colleagues that striking a balance for immediate cuts to water use is a difficult task, Sorensen said agricultural users must be a part of the solution to see any significant progress.

Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said that while Cooke’s withdrawal is a lost opportunity to have a highly qualified person in the job, it’s not likely to disrupt ongoing negotiations. She said the bureau’s acting leadership has been working assiduously to figure out a way forward for river management.

Backed by $15 million in funding, organizations across sectors are developing technologies that address environmental pressures, leaving more room for economic growth, according to Paul Westerhoff, a faculty member at Arizona State University who leads a project working group.

Cut Colorado River water use now, water researchers and other experts urge in a new report, to avoid putting the river system in a very difficult to potentially catastrophic position in a year. The report’s other authors are John Fleck, an author and writer in residence for the University of New Mexico’s Utton Transboundary Resources Center, researcher Kathryn Sorensen of Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy and Katherine Tara, an attorney for UNM’s Utton Center.

“Let’s hope that we are all wrong and that it snows like hell all winter and runoff is wonderful and we buy ourselves some time and additional buffer,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research for Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy and one of the report’s co-authors. “But of course, it never makes sense to plan as if it’s going to snow, and we have to deal with what is a realistic but not worst-case scenario and take responsible actions.”

"Very often what happens is materials collapse on each other," said Sarah Porter of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

One especially troubling sign of aridification is out of sight but, at least in Arizona, not out of mind. That would be groundwater, which Arizona State University researchers and their colleagues are finding is being rapidly depleted here and around the world.

I spoke with hydrologist and sustainability professor Jay Famiglietti about some global research with significant implications for Arizona. Perhaps not surprisingly, he and colleagues find that dry regions like ours are drying even more with climate change and water overuse.

"They can swell like 10 times their volume just by sucking humidity out of the air” and work even in very dry environments, said Paul Westerhoff, a professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. It’s “where a lot of the excitement in the field is."

“Current water management efforts need to be revisited on a war footing,” stated Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an Earth system scientist at ASU.

"We found a big relationship between areas with groundwater stress and lack of groundwater management," said Karem Abdelmohsen with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at ASU.