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South Platte: Greeley to Balzac

Division 1 · Water District 1 · As of 2026-09-26 05:04 MDT · 3 weeks ago

Who may take water from the South Platte: Greeley to Balzac, who is calling for it today, and how it is running, compiled from Colorado Division of Water Resources records. Click anything on the map for its record.

Live · machine-built

South Platte: Greeley to Balzac on the ground — the ditches, wells, reservoirs and gages of Water District 1 · clicktap anything for its record

Browse this district’s ditches, gages, reservoirs, wells and springs as a list.

16% of normal flow, week of 2026-09-21
0 calls the record places on it, 7 unsettled

The South Platte River is critically low for late September -- 16% of normal flow. No call that the record places on it is active right now. DWR's statements do not settle whether 7 more calls reach it.

Drought

Source Our computation, no independent reference · computed here from the screened DWR record Source Independent agency measurement · fetched 2026-10-06 · verify at U.S. Drought Monitor ↗

Right now

This is the 20th-driest week 39 in 124 years of record at SOUTH PLATTE RIVER NEAR KERSEY, CO (as of 2026-09-21; this week’s flow sits at the 16th percentileRank against the record: a river at its 5th percentile is lower than it was in 95 of the past 100 years on this same date. for the date). On this week’s US Drought Monitor, Weld County is 7% in D4 exceptional drought (2026-10-06).

Every year since 1901, week by week

Each thin row is a year at SOUTH PLATTE RIVER NEAR KERSEY, CO; each cell is one week’s flow ranked against the same calendar week of every other year — warm means dry for the date, blue wet, so seasonality cancels and droughts appear as warm bands. Gaps are missing record, never a dry river. Click a year to reconstruct it on the Historical tab.

This year against its analogs

Over the 39 weeks recorded so far, 2026’s weekly trace most resembles 1908 (mean gap 11.8 percentile points; next closest 1950 (12.2), 1932 (13.2)). The analog’s remainder is drawn as context — its ending is what happened to it, not a forecast for this year.

The Drought Monitor’s view since 2000

Mean share of area in each class across Adams, El Paso, Elbert, Morgan, Washington, Weld counties — the counties this district’s gages sit in, which overlap the district imperfectly. The Drought Monitor weighs soils, vegetation and local reports; it is CONTEXT beside the river’s own record above, not the water-rights picture.

This basin’s droughts, by its own record

DroughtSpanWeeks Trough percentileFlows recovered Water table back
the 2002 drought 2002-07-22 → 2003-05-19 43 11th (2002-09-23) 5 weeks not yet (120 of 204 wells still below)
unnamed dry spell 1969-03-03 → 1969-07-21 20 20th (1969-04-28) 6 weeks 2 yr (591 wells, 108 still below)
unnamed dry spell 1966-06-20 → 1967-08-14 60 16th (1966-08-22) 13 weeks 2 yr (284 wells, 74 still below)
the 1963-64 drought 1963-05-06 → 1965-08-16 119 15th (1964-12-21) 1 week 13 yr (280 wells, 110 still below)
unnamed dry spell 1960-12-05 → 1961-05-01 21 28th (1961-01-09) 6 weeks 2 yr (122 wells, 33 still below)
the 1950s drought 1953-10-12 → 1957-07-29 198 2nd (1955-02-14) 0 weeks 31 yr (65 wells, 26 still below)
the 1950s drought 1952-12-15 → 1953-09-28 41 22nd (1953-03-09) 198 weeks 57 yr (65 wells, 32 still below)
the 1950s drought 1950-01-02 → 1951-09-24 90 11th (1951-01-08) 10 weeks not yet (37 of 68 wells still below)
unnamed dry spell 1948-11-01 → 1949-06-13 32 15th (1948-12-20) 2 weeks 27 yr (62 wells, 28 still below)
unnamed dry spell 1946-06-03 → 1947-02-03 35 21st (1946-08-19) 19 weeks 1 yr (48 wells, 9 still below)
unnamed dry spell 1944-11-13 → 1945-08-20 40 17th (1945-03-12) 4 weeks 2 yr (46 wells, 10 still below)
unnamed dry spell 1943-11-15 → 1944-07-10 34 13th (1944-03-06) 62 weeks 1 yr (45 wells, 7 still below)
the 1930s Dust Bowl drought 1939-09-18 → 1941-08-25 101 5th (1939-12-11) 33 weeks 2 yr (24 wells, 2 still below)
the 1930s Dust Bowl drought 1937-05-24 → 1938-07-18 60 11th (1938-01-03) 8 weeks 4 yr (21 wells, 3 still below)

Detected mechanically: the 26-week smoothed percentile below the 30th for at least 20 weeks; recovered on regaining the 50th. The water-table clock compares each monitoring well against its own pre-drought median (the 3 years before onset) and dates the year the median well got back — the aquifer remembers longest, and “still below” is a finding, not a gap. The knobs are stated because the episode list depends on them — a different reasonable choice merges or splits episodes at the edges. Names are attached where an episode overlaps a drought Colorado already talks about.

What drought has cost here

Since 1991, federal crop insurance has paid $332,268,749 in drought-caused claims across Adams, El Paso, Elbert, Morgan, Washington, Weld counties — 38.3% of all insured crop losses there. The worst year was 2022 ($81,587,616).

USDA crop-insurance indemnities where the recorded cause of loss is drought, summed over the counties this district's gages sit in. Counties overlap water districts imperfectly, and insured-crop claims are a floor on drought damage, not a total. Source: USDA RMA cause-of-loss files.

When this basin claimed its water

Every bar is a year’s new appropriations (8,493 rights across 124 years of shared record), colored by that year’s wetness from the barcode above. Here the correlation is -0.1 — essentially no wet-dry pattern; here, law and settlement set the pace, not the weather. Across the state both behaviors exist: ephemeral southwest basins file after wet demonstrations, transbasin-source basins under drought — and the biggest statewide filing waves sat in the 1950s drought and after 2002, not in the wet 1980s–90s.

Appropriation dates are the CLAIMED initiation of a right, not the courthouse filing date; the record is survivor-biased (abandoned claims are absent, so failed dry-era scrambles are undercounted); and the big 1960s and 2000s spikes sit on legal events — the pre-1969-Act adjudication era and 2000s legislation — not on weather. A correlation here is a description, never a cause.

New to how a dry winter becomes a call on the river? Anatomy of a drought walks the chain in four minutes — snow to rivers to reservoirs to calls to the water table.

Topology cross-check: 9 parent disagreements, 8 sizable streams not on this network (vs DWR's route framework — under review)

This flow network was built mechanically; DWR's Source Water Route Framework disagrees with it in the places below. Each row is a question a human reviewer has not yet answered — not an error verdict. Checked 22 streams, 13 agree. Know this water? Tell us →

StreamThis site routes it toDWR routes it to
Yerby Draw the mainstem Crow Creek
Crow Creek Cache La Poudre River South Platte River
Spring Creek the mainstem Lone Tree Creek
Owl Creek the mainstem Lone Tree Creek
Lone Tree Creek Cache La Poudre River South Platte River
Sand Arroyo Creek the mainstem Badger Creek
East Bijou Creek the mainstem Bijou Creek
Middle Bijou Creek the mainstem East Bijou Creek

Sizable streams DWR maps here that this network does not carry:

Kiowa Creek (122 mi) · Badger Creek (99 mi) · Twentytwo Slough (27 mi) · Camp Creek (26 mi) · Greasewood Draw (9 mi) · Antelope Draw (9 mi) · Dead Horse Draw (8 mi) · Cris Draw (aka Cris Lee Draw) (6 mi)

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