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Green River Basin

Division 6 · Water District 56
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Green River Basin on the ground — the ditches, wells, reservoirs and gages of Water District 56 · clicktap anything for its record

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

20% of normal flow, week of 2026-06-29
9 calls active on it right now

The Green River is critically low for late June -- 20% of normal flow. 9 calls stand against it right now; the most senior right calling dates to 1882.

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.

Drought

Right now

This is the 16th-driest week 27 in 80 years of record at GREEN RIVER NEAR JENSEN, UT (as of 2026-06-29; this week’s flow sits at the 20th percentile for the date). On this week’s US Drought Monitor, Gilpin County is 39% in D3 extreme drought (2026-09-01). The law agrees: the most senior active call leaves 99% of this district’s decreed flow rights junior to the calling right this week.

Every year since 1946, week by week

Each thin row is a year at GREEN RIVER NEAR JENSEN, UT; 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 Gilpin, Moffat 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.

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 2004 — 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 (80 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 2025-06-30 → 2026-02-16 33 24th (2025-08-11) not yet
the 2020-22 drought 2022-03-14 → 2022-10-17 31 25th (2022-05-02) 6 weeks
the 2020-22 drought 2021-03-22 → 2022-02-21 48 11th (2021-08-09) 40 weeks
the 2012-13 drought 2012-09-10 → 2014-06-16 92 15th (2012-11-19) 9 weeks
unnamed dry spell 2007-09-03 → 2008-08-11 49 16th (2008-04-14) 2 weeks
the 2002 drought 2003-08-04 → 2005-02-21 81 16th (2003-12-29) 19 weeks
the 2002 drought 2001-07-30 → 2003-07-28 104 5th (2002-10-14) 101 weeks
unnamed dry spell 2000-10-23 → 2001-03-26 22 23rd (2000-11-27) 223 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1994-08-29 → 1995-02-20 25 25th (1994-11-21) 21 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1992-07-27 → 1993-05-10 41 20th (1992-11-02) 6 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1991-05-20 → 1991-11-11 25 26th (1991-07-08) 10 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1990-05-07 → 1991-04-01 47 17th (1990-10-08) 42 weeks
unnamed dry spell 1988-10-03 → 1990-03-05 74 18th (1989-09-25) 98 weeks
the 1981 drought 1981-06-01 → 1981-11-09 23 24th (1981-08-24) 6 weeks

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 $302,432 in drought-caused claims across Gilpin, Moffat counties — 1.0% of all insured crop losses there. The worst year was 2013 ($128,960).

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 (677 rights across 81 years of shared record), colored by that year’s wetness from the barcode above. Here the correlation is +0.13 — 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: 10 parent disagreements (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 12 streams, 2 agree. Know this water? Tell us →

StreamThis site routes it toDWR routes it to
Birdie Gulch the mainstem nan
Skeltcher Creek the mainstem Beaver Creek
Fisher Creek the mainstem nan
NS Creek the mainstem Antone Canyon Creek
Canyon Creek the mainstem Vermillion Creek
G Wash the mainstem Canyon Creek
Fonce Wash the mainstem G Wash
Shell Creek the mainstem Vermillion Creek
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