← your water story · water year 2026

Where the water sits,
and where it combines

The detailed, reservoir-by-reservoir map, best on a big screen. Reservoirs are glasses of water, rivers are ribbons of color, and the Continental Divide runs down the middle. For the guided overview, start from the seven-basin story. On a phone, the Flow & mixing view shows how a basin's water steps down. Or watch the 2026 drought arrive.

snapshot 22 Jul 2026
storage KAF · flow cfs
medians derived · CDSS/USGS
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How to read it

Solid glass — a measured, dated reading
Dashed glass — estimated from its basin's % of median
Bone tick — where the level normally sits today
Dashed line — a tunnel carrying water under the Divide
▼ marker — the glass is being drawn down to feed the river

Each reservoir is a glass whose area is its total capacity, wide at the rim and narrow at the base, the way a canyon reservoir holds water. Fill color is the water's source. The level is filled by area, so a half-full glass holds half its capacity. Click any glass for its percent of normal and the rest of its detail.

The seven colors

Colors repeat only between rivers that can never mix, so within any one river every color is unique and a blend is always traceable. Map rivers use the same hues, and mainstems fade toward the blend of everything they have collected. Braid mode on the flow view splits every ribbon into its source shares.

Data & live readings

  • Colorado DWR telemetry (CDSS) dwr.state.co.us · storage for 27 reservoirs and flow at the 2 DWR-operated gages, refreshed daily
  • USGS NWIS waterservices.usgs.gov/nwis/iv/ · discharge at the other 16 gages, refreshed daily
  • Denver Water · USBR · Northern Water published storage in the baseline snapshot
  • NRCS Water Supply Outlook monthly basin % of 1991–2020 median, the timeline's backbone
Daily readings load automatically; the snapshot stands in wherever they can't.

Want the numbers themselves? The full dataset is on the data page as downloadable CSVs.