Colorado River Status tracks storage levels across the Colorado River basin — from the headwaters in the Rockies down through Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and the Lower Basin reservoirs that supply the Southwest. The stoplight map on the home page shows each major dam and reservoir at a glance: green, yellow, red, or gray, based on where storage sits against its historical range, with overrides for critical elevations at key structures like Glen Canyon and Hoover.
The river basin serves roughly 40 million people and several million acres of farmland across seven states and Mexico, and its reservoirs have spent much of the past two decades well below historical norms. This site exists to make that status legible in one view, updated regularly, instead of scattered across dozens of agency pages.
Right now the map is an indicative first pass: colors are driven by a percent-of-capacity stand-in while the underlying percentile-vs-history methodology is finished, and a number of smaller reservoirs are still gray for lack of data. A weekly fetch script pulls fresh figures from USBR and partner sources automatically; the rest of the methodology — true historical percentiles, verified critical elevations, trend indicators — is in progress and tracked in the open.
Expect this space to carry short updates as the methodology firms up and more reservoirs come online.