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Arikaree River

Division 1 · Water District 65 · As of 2026-08-17 03:31 MDT · 3 weeks ago
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Arikaree River on the ground — the ditches, wells, reservoirs and gages of Water District 65 · clicktap anything for its record

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

65% of normal flow, week of 2026-08-10
24 calls active on it right now

The Arikaree River is below normal for early August -- 65% of normal flow. 24 calls stand against it right now; the most senior right calling dates to 1860.

19,728 well permits on file — not decreed rights
32% household or domestic use
231 ft median depth, 12,052 wells reporting

43% are constructed wells; 17% are tied to a decreed structure. A permit is the State Engineer's permission to drill and use a well, not a water right; most here are exempt household wells that sit outside the priority line and never needed a decree — three things called “well”. Turn on the Well permits chip on the map above to see where they are.

The Driller’s Atlas · Plate 2 A cross-section nobody surveyed

Every permitted well within a few miles of the line, drawn from the ground to its drilled depth as the driller filed it. The bright part of each stroke is the perforated casing — where the well actually takes water — coloured by the aquifer named on the permit. Nobody arranged these; the aquifers arrange themselves.

Hover or arrow through the strokes to read a well.

The same corridor as a table
Miles from AWells drawn Median depth (ft)With a screen Most-named aquiferNo depth filed

Bins run from end A to end B of the line. “Most-named aquifer” is the family most often named on permits in the bin, with its count; permits naming no aquifer are the majority of the file and are not a family.

Drought

Right now

This is the 62nd-driest week 33 in 95 years of record at ARIKAREE RIVER AT HAIGLER, NEBR. (as of 2026-08-10; this week’s flow sits at the 65th percentile for the date). On this week’s US Drought Monitor, Yuma County is 83% in D0 abnormally dry drought (2026-09-01). The law agrees: the most senior active call leaves 0% of this district’s decreed flow rights junior to the calling right this week.

Every year since 1932, week by week

Each thin row is a year at ARIKAREE RIVER AT HAIGLER, NEBR.; 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.

The Drought Monitor’s view since 2000

Mean share of area in each class across Yuma county — 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.

The law’s own drought gauge

When water runs short, administration answers: calls reach further back in time, and more decreed rights go junior to the calling right. This is that response, weekly since 2007 — the share of this district’s decreed flow rights junior to the most senior active call. Watch it spike in the named droughts below, and linger after the river recovers.

Computed from DWR’s call record (7 calls touching this district) against the district’s rights index. Scoping is deliberately coarse — a call’s own district, or districts named in its comments — and this is administration’s RESPONSE, not a per-structure verdict (each dossier’s curtailment card does that, with stream miles). A deepening call can also reflect growing demand, not only shrinking supply.

This basin’s droughts, by its own record

DroughtSpanWeeks Trough percentileRecovery
unnamed dry spell 2026-01-26 → 2026-08-10 28 11th (2026-04-06) not yet
unnamed dry spell 2024-12-30 → 2025-09-29 39 11th (2025-04-21) not yet
unnamed dry spell 2024-01-15 → 2024-10-28 41 10th (2024-04-22) not yet
the 2020-22 drought 2022-01-03 → 2023-10-09 92 10th (2023-04-24) not yet
the 2020-22 drought 2021-02-01 → 2021-10-11 36 11th (2021-04-19) not yet
the 2020-22 drought 2020-01-13 → 2020-10-19 40 10th (2020-04-20) not yet
the 2018 drought 2018-12-17 → 2019-10-21 44 11th (2019-04-15) not yet
the 2012-13 drought 2011-12-12 → 2018-11-26 363 4th (2014-10-13) not yet
the 2012-13 drought 2011-01-10 → 2011-10-03 38 22nd (2011-05-16) not yet
unnamed dry spell 2009-01-19 → 2010-05-24 70 17th (2009-05-18) not yet
the 2002 drought 2001-05-07 → 2008-09-22 385 6th (2002-10-07) not yet

Detected mechanically: the 26-week smoothed percentile below the 30th for at least 20 weeks; recovered on regaining the 50th. 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 $74,906,059 in drought-caused claims across Yuma county — 22.5% of all insured crop losses there. The worst year was 2022 ($19,143,472).

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 (72 rights across 95 years of shared record), colored by that year’s wetness from the barcode above. Here the correlation is +0.07 — 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: 0 parent disagreements, 4 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 0 streams, 0 agree. Know this water? Tell us →

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

Chief Creek (12 mi) · Rush Creek (4 mi) · Holy Joe Creek (3 mi) · Hayes Creek (3 mi)

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