Water officials are generally more level-headed than the public when it comes to the weather and the consequences it has on our water supply. But allow Luke Shawcross to be a regular person for a second and not the water resources manager at Northern Water, which is well known for its Colorado-Big Thompson (C-BT) Project that provides a significant portion of Greeley’s and Fort Collins’ water supply.
“It felt like we just went from fall to spring,” Shawcross says, not bothering to hide the wonder in his voice. “We had, what, a week or two of winter?”
This winter was, at times, mind-boggling. The state had the third warmest November, the warmest December and one of the warmest Januarys in 130 years of records, sometimes by a wide margin, according to Russ Schumacher, state climatologist with Colorado State University’s Climate Center, in a blog. All that warmth led to what he calls the state’s worst snowpack in more than 40 years…