Take the numbers with you

Every reservoir in the set

Rows marked live were refreshed from Colorado DWR telemetry when this page loaded. Observed rows carry a published, dated reading; basin estimate rows are scaled to their basin's NRCS percent of median because no same-day public reading was available.

Column dictionary

• capacity_af / storage_af — total and current storage in acre-feet. An acre-foot floods one acre a foot deep: roughly what two Front Range households use in a year.
• pct_of_median_1991_2020 — storage against the NRCS median for this calendar day, 100 = a normal year.
• confidence — observed: published, dated reading; live: DWR telemetry fetched by your browser; basin estimate: scaled from the basin's percent of median.
• role — water supply, or flood control for the Corps of Engineers pools (Cherry Creek, Bear Creek): famous lakes nobody drinks from, whose capacity_af is just the small permanent pool and whose percent-of-median is blank because "normal storage" doesn't apply.
• dwr_telemetry_abbrev — Colorado DWR station code, usable directly against the CDSS station tools and REST API.

Where it all comes from

• Colorado DWR / CDSS REST API — live reservoir storage telemetry. dwr.state.co.us/Rest
• USGS NWIS instantaneous values — live streamflow. waterservices.usgs.gov
• Denver Water — daily storage for its 12-reservoir system. denverwater.org
• US Bureau of Reclamation — Granby, Blue Mesa, Navajo, Pueblo and other federal projects. usbr.gov/uc/water
• NRCS Colorado Water Supply Outlook — the monthly basin percent-of-median series. nrcs.usda.gov

All of it is public, US-government or utility-published data. This project only collates it — check the primary sources before using any number for anything that matters.