Wyoming Shelves Green River Water-Use Measurement Project — SkimNews
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- Wyoming shelved a state-funded project to measure water use in the Green River and Little Snake River basins, ending the effort to produce a basin-wide estimate of water lost to irrigation.
- Wyoming abandoned the project because it could not gather enough data to credibly calculate irrigation losses across the basins.
- At a meeting in Cheyenne last month, Wyoming state members discussed the shelved project in the state legislature's capitol.
- The decision leaves Wyoming — a headwater contributor to the Colorado River system via the Green River — without a completed measurement of irrigation depletion in those basins.
Why it matters: Wyoming's portion of the Colorado River basin now lacks a state-produced estimate of irrigation losses, a concrete data gap that weakens the case for any precise accounting of Wyoming's consumptive water use.
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