The Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), the four Upper Division States (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), and the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) play critical roles in managing water throughout the Upper Colorado River Basin.
In 2022, both Reclamation and the UCRC formally adopted the eeMETRIC method—one of the approaches available through OpenET—to support irrigated agricultural water use accounting for interstate purposes. Since that time, Reclamation has relied on eeMETRIC to produce its Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports, while the UCRC uses eeMETRIC annually to support water use accounting for compliance with the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
Recently, the UCRC also employed eeMETRIC to evaluate historical consumptive use and conserved consumptive use as part of the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP)—an unprecedented effort enabling field-scale water use evaluations across the Upper Basin. This analysis provided a transparent and equitable foundation for understanding conservation outcomes, strengthening collaboration and trust among water users and state and federal partners.
Building on these successes, Reclamation, the Upper Division States, and the UCRC are now undertaking a basin-wide instrumentation initiative, installing new eddy covariance towers to validate remote-sensing methods such as eeMETRIC. This large-scale effort will enhance confidence in satellite-based evapotranspiration estimates and support long-term water management decisions across the Upper Colorado River Basin.
