By: IEEE Spectrum, April 8, 2026
Nobody manages more of the Colorado River’s daily operations than the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. If the federal government follows through on its threat to impose a water-sharing plan, it will be Reclamation doing the imposing, and making decisions about how much water flows from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the country.

The clearest gains are in streamflow forecasting. Machine learning techniques, pulling on satellite data and weather stations well outside the basin, now outperform traditional methods across a range of conditions. Forecasts update every hour. In some areas, managers are getting five to seven days of advance warning on flood events, compared with three in the past, which gives them time to reduce the water in reservoirs before high inflows arrive.

The tool Zagona’s group developed with Reclamation and the consulting firm Virga Labs puts the framework into practice in a web-based tool, running CRSS across more than 8,000 possible future water supply scenarios to show how different management strategies hold up against the full range of what climate change might bring. At its center is an evolutionary algorithm called Borg, which generates and iteratively refines those strategies, searching for plans that perform well across many scenarios. The result is a set of tradeoffs, not a single answer.