Federal water-level data tracking the High Plains aquifer across eight states shows groundwater declines accelerating since the 1950s, with recoverable storage shrinking across Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. The timeline for severe shortages in these states may be compressing faster than official water plans assumed, as persistent drought, rising agricultural demand, and warming temperatures converge on the same underground reserves. The consequences extend well beyond farm country: cities, energy producers, and downstream river systems all depend on the same finite supply.
Seven Decades of Decline Beneath the Plains
The High Plains aquifer, commonly called the Ogallala, stretches beneath all eight states now drawing concern from federal scientists. Data published by the U.S. Geological Survey on aquifer water-level changes tracks conditions from predevelopment (about 1950) through 2019, along with a shorter comparison window from 2017 to 2019. That dataset includes changes in recoverable water in storage, the metric that determines how much water can actually be pumped to the surface for irrigation, municipal use, and industry. Across large portions of western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and the Texas Panhandle, the maps show declines of tens to more than a hundred feet since large-scale pumping began.
What makes the recent data alarming is not simply that levels are lower than they were 70 years ago. The 2017-to-2019 window shows continued declines in many monitoring wells even after decades of awareness campaigns and conservation programs. The aquifer recharges slowly, fed mainly by rainfall that percolates through thick layers of soil and rock, and in many areas the natural refill is only a fraction of what modern irrigation systems withdraw each year. In parts of western Kansas and the Texas Panhandle, extraction rates have long outpaced natural replenishment. The USGS dataset confirms that the gap between what goes in and what gets pumped out has not closed, and in several sub-regions it has widened. Complementary water-use compilations from the same agency, which break withdrawals down by sector and geography every five years, show agriculture as the dominant consumer across these Plains states, a pattern that leaves little slack when drought tightens surface-water supplies and forces even more reliance on groundwater.
Drought Conditions Are Compounding the Pressure
Aquifer depletion alone would be a slow-moving problem. Drought turns it into an urgent one. The U.S. government’s seasonal outlooks for dryness, published by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and accessible through the national drought outlook portal, project conditions roughly three months ahead and have repeatedly flagged persistent or developing drought across sections of the High Plains. National drought tracking from the broader Drought.gov partnership of NIDIS, NOAA, USDA, and NASA provides weekly data on the percentage of area falling into drought categories D1 through D4, and recent readings have shown degradation spreading in key agricultural belts with few areas improving enough to offset the losses.
Warmer temperatures are making the situation worse in ways that go beyond simple rainfall deficits. The U.S. Drought Monitor hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has documented how higher temperatures limited snow accumulation in some basins and contributed to surface drying where snow cover was sparse. Less snowpack means less spring melt feeding streams and reservoirs, which in turn pushes farmers and municipalities to pump more groundwater. That feedback loop (drought driving heavier aquifer use, which leaves less buffer for the next drought) is the mechanism that could push crisis timelines forward by years rather than decades. As shallow wells go dry first, deeper and more energy-intensive pumping becomes necessary, raising costs and further concentrating pressure on the remaining saturated zones.
Colorado River Stress Spills Into the Same States
Several of the eight High Plains states also depend on the Colorado River system, creating a second front of water risk that interacts with aquifer depletion. Colorado and New Mexico sit in the Upper Basin, and both face shortage projections from the Bureau of Reclamation’s ongoing Colorado River studies, which include the 24-Month Studies modeling reservoir operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead two years into the future. These analyses simulate a range of hydrologic conditions and operational rules to estimate future reservoir elevations, hydropower generation, and the likelihood of crossing critical shortage thresholds that would trigger additional cuts to downstream deliveries.
The September 2025 edition of the “Most Probable” 24-Month Study, available through Reclamation’s data catalog, uses a median-inflow scenario, meaning inflows are assumed to be exceeded 50 percent of the time. Even under that middle-of-the-road assumption, the system faces tight margins, with Powell and Mead projected to hover near levels that have in past years prompted emergency negotiations among basin states. The Department of the Interior has responded by securing a series of short-term conservation agreements designed to keep additional water in Lake Mead through 2026, measured in acre-feet of conserved supply. Those deals buy time, but they do not solve the structural imbalance between what the river delivers and what seven states, two countries, and dozens of tribal nations withdraw. For states like Colorado and New Mexico that straddle both the Ogallala and the Colorado River Basin, losing ground on both fronts simultaneously means there is no easy backup source to tap when one system falters.
Texas and Arizona Offer a Preview
Two states with the most detailed public projections illustrate how quickly supply and demand lines can cross when groundwater and surface water are both under stress. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, drawing on the 2022 state planning process, has warned that water demands could outpace supply in parts of the state by 2070, with both a projected supply decrease and a projected demand increase over that horizon. Those projections, summarized in fiscal analyses from the comptroller’s office, also estimate the share of the population that would face municipal shortages absent new supply development or aggressive conservation. That 2070 target date, however, assumes orderly investment in new infrastructure and continued access to groundwater at today’s costs and volumes. Prolonged Ogallala depletion and back-to-back drought years could pull the crossover point closer, particularly for rural communities and irrigated agriculture that lack alternative import options.
Arizona’s situation is equally instructive, even though it lies mostly outside the High Plains aquifer footprint. State regulators have already restricted some new subdivisions that would rely on groundwater in the fast-growing Phoenix area after modeling showed long-term deficits between projected pumping and available supplies. Those decisions underscore how quickly growth assumptions can be upended once groundwater models are updated with recent climate and pumping data. For High Plains states, Arizona’s experience with combining groundwater management, Colorado River shortages, and rapid urban expansion offers a preview of the complex trade-offs that may soon confront cities from the Front Range to the Texas Panhandle.
What Accelerating Declines Mean for Policy
As the data converge on the same conclusion (less water in storage, more frequent drought, and tighter margins on major rivers), the policy questions become less about whether change is needed and more about how fast it must occur. Federal scientists emphasize that aquifers like the High Plains are not single uniform bathtubs but patchworks of connected and disconnected subunits, a point explained in public USGS water FAQs that address common misconceptions about groundwater systems. That heterogeneity means some counties can stabilize levels with modest conservation, while others face essentially nonrenewable conditions where pumping today is a one-time drawdown of ancient reserves. State and local rules that treat all wells or all landowners identically may struggle to reflect those differences.
For planners, the accelerating declines argue for stress-testing water portfolios against more pessimistic scenarios than those used in many legacy plans. That could include assuming longer multi-year droughts, faster loss of inexpensive groundwater, and lower average flows on rivers like the Colorado. It also means confronting trade-offs among sectors: how much irrigated acreage can realistically be maintained, how to prioritize between municipal growth and industrial expansion, and what environmental flows are needed to keep rivers and wetlands functioning. The High Plains aquifer has supported one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions for decades, but the latest measurements suggest that without faster adjustments in pumping, cropping patterns, and regional growth expectations, the timeline for hard choices is moving up, not receding into the next century.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
