Lake Mead Area Hit With Weather Warnings Amid Thunderstorms

The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued a flash-flood warning on the edges of Lake Mead as heavy rain and thunderstorms hit the area.

Willow Beach and King Wash Road are the areas that will be most affected, south of the Hoover Dam, which controls the lake, near the Arizona-Nevada border.

Lake Mead, Nevada, is the largest reservoir in the U.S. by volume, with a capacity of over 31 million acre-feet, according to the National Park Service. It is fed by the Colorado River and provides water to 25 million people.

“Look out in the Willow Beach and Highway 93 areas near Lake Mead,” the NWS Las Vegas said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday night. “Very heavy rain is occurring with a thunderstorm in the area. Seek higher ground in and be prepared for flooded washes.”

Since early April, the reservoir’s water levels have steadily risen from 1,046 feet above sea level to 1,063. This is a marked improvement on the reservoir’s water levels from last year, which hit 1,040 feet above sea level, the lowest the lake has been since its creation in the 1930s.

While Lake Mead’s water levels are higher this year and are continuing to rise, they are still well below previous averages as a result of the long-standing megadrought gripping the Southwest.

Heavy rain and flooding in the area does go some way to restoring the reservoir’s water levels, but the most significant contribution comes from snowpack melt in the Rocky Mountains.

This year, snowpack across the Colorado mountains was 120 percent higher statewide than its average levels over the last 30 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service snow survey data.

While the data so far this year is looking promising, experts from the Bureau of Reclamation have predicted that the lake could reach an all-time low of 1,024.47 feet by November.

“The water-supply forecasts look to be above average,” Haley Paul, Arizona policy director for the National Audubon Society, previously told Newsweek. “But, remember, because our reservoirs—particularly Powell and Mead—are so low from 23-plus years of drought, it would take many years of above-average snow and runoff to refill the reservoirs.

“We cannot take our eye off the ball in terms of figuring out how to use less water from the Colorado River to prevent the reservoirs from falling to catastrophically low levels.”

“Lake Mead’s water levels have been declining since 2000,” Jennifer Pitt, director of the Audubon Colorado River Program, told Newsweek in January. “It has gotten warmer and drier.”