Carnero Creek

Division 3 · Water District 27

Auto-mapped

Full diagnostic snapshot pending — this district's weekly-style report (system status, active calls, hydrographs, anomaly flags) is produced by the nightly rotation and appears here after its first run. The tabs above are live now.

Reconstruct conditions as of

Evolution of the network

Gage flow trend & changepoints

What counts as a trend here

Computed 2026-08-20 08:53 from 2 gage(s) with cached period-of-record data. Mann-Kendall (trend) and Pettitt (changepoint) both require at least 8 years spanning at least 10 years of record. A gage below that reports no signal — which is not the same as “no change.”

Of the 2 gages with enough record, 2 are trending down and 0 up, and 1 carries a detected shift. The clearest is CARNERO CREEK NEAR LA GARITA, CO., -8.7 points of its long-term median per decade over 108 years (p=0.0002).

Gage	Trend	Change / decade points of median	Significance	Years	Changepoint
▸ CARNERO CREEK NEAR LA GARITA, CO. CARLAGCO	↓ decreasing	-8.7	p=0.000	108	~1949
▸ LA GARITA CREEK NEAR LA GARITA, CO LAGLAGCO	↓ decreasing	-3.6	p=0.047	107	—

How the measurement network itself changed

This basin was not always measured the way it is today — the API-era record is dense and recent, the early record sparse. 2 gage(s) and 36 structure(s) report in 2026, but structure reporting only reached half its modern level around ~1986. Every historical claim below is checked against this: long-term shifts that co-move with the growth of the network carry an explicit measurement-evolution caution, and abandonment screens whose idleness begins before the modern reporting era are flagged †.

Decade	Gages with data (median yr)	Structures reporting (median yr)
1910s	2	0
1920s	2	0
1930s	2	0
1940s	2	0
1950s	2	12
1960s	2	16
1970s	2	14
1980s	2	24
1990s	2	37
2000s	2	32
2010s	2	44
2020s	2	36

Mass-balance (network closure) trend

Structure divrec-history backfill coverage as of the last check: 13% of 240 schematic-relevant structures. 0 year(s) clear the 30% coverage gate so far -- the trend activates automatically once qualifying years span a full decade. No action needed; the nightly backfill keeps extending the record.

Reach gain/loss shifts (–)

Mass-balance kinks computed for every summer month back to (0 reach-snapshots) — which reaches gain or lose water, and how that has shifted across decades. Each shift is cross-checked against the observation record above: as more diversions became metered, "unaccounted" water shrinks mechanically, which can masquerade as a hydrologic shift.

No reach shows a statistically significant long-term gain/loss shift.

Groundwater now has its own tab: 137 monitored well(s), water-table trends, stream corridors, and the advisory depletion screen.

Cross-gage pattern fingerprint

Not enough gages with a long enough common-coverage window yet to fingerprint shared patterns.

Data provenance & quality

Where these numbers come from and how far they can be trusted. Grade C (3/6 points) — the components below are the finding; the letter alone is not. Sources: DWR HydroBase snapshot HydroBase_CO_20260707 (imported 2026-08-19) for history, plus the CDSS REST API for current conditions.

Check	State	What was measured
gage freshness	stale	newest gage reading is 45 day(s) old (target 7)
diversion record	expected-lag	newest diversion record is 293 day(s) old (DWR publishes ~1 year in arrears)
structure coverage	sparse	13% of schematic structures have data

Independent check: PASS — 100.0000% agreement across 183,751 stored values re-checked against DWR's authoritative record (HydroBase_CO_20260707), over 20 structures. 0 disagreement(s) beyond a 0.01 cfs tolerance. Checked 2026-08-19; a rotating sample covers the whole basin across successive runs, and the structures this report cites are checked every time.

Federal cross-check: PASS — 100.00% day-level agreement with USGS's own published records for the same gages, across 2 co-listed station(s) and 42,223 overlapping days (within max(2%, 0.5 cfs) daily). Pre-1950 records at some gages carry known between-agency day-stamp and transcription differences — scored at each year's best ±1-day alignment; residual disagreement is real historical divergence, flagged for review.

2 gage(s) / 71,639 daily values (1919-04-01–2026-07-06); 75 structure(s) with diversion records; 1304 with decreed rights. Methodology has not yet had independent expert review — treat every figure as an advisory screen, not an administrative or legal conclusion.

17,726 water-level measurements across 137 monitored well(s) — 73 alluvial, 22 bedrock — plus 0 administered well(s) reporting metered pumping.

What is being counted

Observation wells and pumping wells are different populations and are never conflated: water levels come from monitored observation wells, and metered pumping comes from administered wells reporting through diversion records. Click any well to chart its own record.

Well map

3D aquifer x-ray

Every aquifer unit as its own head surface, animated through time.

How the surfaces are built, and what they are not

Alluvial water table on top, Denver Basin members (Dawson, Denver, Arapahoe, Laramie–Fox Hills) stacked beneath where measured, interpolated from measured water levels. Units are never mixed; a surface exists only inside its own unit's well coverage, with no extrapolation; thin epochs are suppressed and say why. Vertical scale is exaggerated for readability and z is head elevation in feet. These are measured heads, not a calibrated groundwater model.

Water-table trends

Of 54 well(s) with enough record for a trend test: 42 declining, 0 rising.

Fastest-declining wells	Setting	ft / decade	Span
▸ NA04101018DDD1 EW-41U	alluvial	-12.03	28 yr
▸ NA04200936DDD1 RG23	alluvial	-9.67	15 yr
▸ NA04100901DCD2 EW-48C	alluvial	-9.55	21 yr
▸ NA04100901DCD1 EW-48U	alluvial	-9.46	21 yr
▸ NA04101018DDD2 EW-41C	alluvial	-9.25	32 yr
▸ NA04101004CCC1 EW-47U	alluvial	-8.28	35 yr
▸ NA04101004CCC2 EW-47C-1	alluvial	-8.24	34 yr
▸ NA04100921DAA RG28-1	alluvial	-7.27	43 yr

Wells labeled by administrative world before anything else is said about them: tributary alluvium participates in the priority system; designated-basin and Denver Basin bedrock aquifers are governed differently and are excluded from stream-connection reasoning. Read bedrock declines differently too: deep bedrock aquifers recharge negligibly on human timescales, so a falling bedrock level is storage mining — effectively permanent — not a drought response that a wet year undoes. All screens advisory.

Decreed rights on this network run from 1859-12-31 to 2019-01-29. 14 abandonment screens and 22 compliance flags are listed below as leads for review — a screen is not an abandonment and a flag is not a violation.

Rights on file: 1530 across 1304 structure(s); 22 structure(s) carry 0 court-case references. Advisory reading aids on public DWR data — not administrative or legal conclusions.

Abandonment radar (14 screens)

Absolute rights with 10+ years of no recorded diversions. Screens only — storage, alternate points, and plan operations can explain nonuse lawfully. And diversion REPORTING itself only reached its modern level ~1986 — idleness that begins before then may be unreported use, not nonuse (flagged † below).

COOLIE D (2700507) (1884-12-31, 1.0 cfs decreed): last active 1985 — 40 years idle † predates modern reporting era — last recorded activity predates this basin's modern reporting era (~1986) -- early absence of record is weak evidence of nonuse
VALE SEEPAGE D (2700597) (1922-04-01, 8.3 cfs decreed): last active 1993 — 32 years idle
AYERS D (2700620) (1981-02-26, 0.0 cfs decreed): last active 1993 — 32 years idle
N DITCH (2700631) (1983-05-01, 5.0 cfs decreed): last active 1995 — 30 years idle
GUNBARREL SEPG OVFL D (2700520) (1891-11-17, 44.0 cfs decreed): last active 1996 — 29 years idle
HARNEY DITCH (2700691) (1970-06-30, 5.0 cfs decreed): last active 2000 — 25 years idle
LA GARITA D (2700526) (1940-08-12, 20.0 cfs decreed): last active 2001 — 24 years idle
WILSON D NO 1 (2700552) (1884-12-31, 4.4 cfs decreed): last active 2004 — 21 years idle
C DITCH (2700632) (1983-05-01, 10.0 cfs decreed): last active 2004 — 21 years idle
MANUEL D 1 (2700530) (1873-06-30, 2.8 cfs decreed): last active 2007 — 18 years idle

Compliance screens (22 advisory flags)

Screened 47 of 1304 structures with rights (47 have diversion history on file). A flag is a lead for expert review — augmentation plans, exchanges, and free-river conditions can make over-decree diversions lawful and are deliberately not modeled.

LA GARITA D (2700526): Observed p99 daily rate 64.0 cfs (max 64.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 20.0 cfs across 2160 recorded day(s).
MCLEOD D NO 3 (2700533): Observed p99 daily rate 40.0 cfs (max 60.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 0.7 cfs across 6092 recorded day(s).
GREEN D NO 1 (2700518): Observed p99 daily rate 19.0 cfs (max 30.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 16.3 cfs across 13559 recorded day(s).
C DITCH (2700632): Observed p99 daily rate 15.0 cfs (max 20.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 10.0 cfs across 514 recorded day(s).
BIEDELL D NO 2 (2700503): Observed p99 daily rate 12.0 cfs (max 25.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 2.3 cfs across 6734 recorded day(s).
LA MAGOTES D (2700528): Observed p99 daily rate 12.0 cfs (max 16.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 1.8 cfs across 4902 recorded day(s).
WILSON D NO 1 (2700552): Observed p99 daily rate 10.0 cfs (max 10.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 4.4 cfs across 2454 recorded day(s).
WILSON D NO 4 (2700553): Observed p99 daily rate 8.0 cfs (max 10.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 2.1 cfs across 6272 recorded day(s).
NAVIN D (2700604): Observed p99 daily rate 7.0 cfs (max 13.2) exceeds total decreed absolute 5.5 cfs across 4008 recorded day(s).
MCLEOD D NO 4 & 5 (2700714): Observed p99 daily rate 7.0 cfs (max 9.0) exceeds total decreed absolute 6.1 cfs across 2926 recorded day(s).

Seniority (top structures by decreed rate)

Structure	Senior priority date	Rights	Decreed abs (cfs)	Conditional?
CARNERO N BR DIVERSION (RIO GRANDE CANAL (2700683)	1986-05-15	1	150.0	—
USFS QP45A (2700702)	1938-06-20	1	116.2	—
USFS QP45D (2700705)	1905-06-13	1	61.0	—
ROCKY HILL SEEPAGE AND OVERFLOW DITCH (2700543)	1891-11-17	1	44.6	—
GUNBARREL SEPG OVFL D (2700520)	1891-11-17	1	44.0	—
LATERAL 7-A SEPG OVFL D (2700529)	1891-11-17	1	43.6	—
BIEDELL D NO 10 (2700502)	1870-05-31	18	42.8	—
OMNIBUS D (2700538)	1869-04-30	25	42.7	—
JOHNNIE SMITH D NO 1 (2700523)	1888-04-30	3	42.7	—
HOME D NO 1 (2700522)	1871-04-30	11	32.4	—
USFS QP45F (2700707)	1905-06-13	1	26.2	—
ANDERSON BERNARD SEPG D (2700557)	1948-10-23	1	24.0	—
USFS QP45E (2700706)	1905-06-13	1	23.0	—
LA GARITA D (2700526)	1940-08-12	1	20.0	—
WHITE D (2700551)	1908-04-22	3	17.9	—

No inventory or legal-document changes detected since the daily watch began.

If a call were placed at a given seniority, which structures in this basin would be out of priority, and how much of their decreed rate would be curtailed? Computed from this basin's cached decrees.

What this does and doesn't model. Seniority arithmetic only: every right junior to the call is treated as curtailed. It does not model reach applicability — structures downstream of the calling point are not administered by it — and it applies no futile-call judgment. Read it as “who is junior to this date, and by how much,” not as a prediction of what the Division Engineer would actually order.

Pick a calling right

Real decrees from this basin, ordered by administration number — that is, by actual seniority. The years will look out of order, and that is correct: an administration number encodes the adjudication date as well as the appropriation date, so a right appropriated in 1970 can be administered ahead of one from 1950. A senior call curtails almost everything; a junior one curtails almost nothing.

Or enter an administration number directly

Administration number

DWR administration numbers encode appropriation and adjudication dates; lower is more senior.