Featured Collection introduction: Severe sustained drought revisited managing the Colorado River system in times of water shortage 25 years later—Part II

The call for papers for the JAWRA Featured Collection: Severe Sustained Drought Revisited: Managing the Colorado River System in Times of Water Shortage 25 Years Later led to more insights than could fit into a single issue. This second set of articles highlights the work done by Salehabadi et al. ( 2022 ) on three historically based drought scenarios, McCoy et al. ( 2022 ) on explaining seven climate- related extreme events of greatest interest to water managers, Colby and Hansen ( 2022 ) on urban water demand management and policies for improving water supply reliability, Garcia- Hernandez et al. ( 2022 ) on water quality in the Colorado River Delta, and Ayres et al. ( 2022 ) on economic losses from re - ducing inflows into the Salton Sea. These papers, alongside the first set of articles (see overview in Frisvold et al., 2022 ), continue to illustrate the range of challenges and the expertise applied to them in thoughtful, innovative, and multi- disciplinary ways. Herein, we provide a short overview of each article. The article by Salehabadi et al. ( 2022 ) quantifies the impacts of three drought scenarios based on three past sustained droughts. The earliest— documented in tree- ring data— occurred from 1576 to 1600 and served as the basis for the original Severe Sustained Drought (SSD) analysis. The next was the mid- 20th Century drought, from 1953 to 1977. The third was the Millennium Drought that began in 2000 and is ongoing. The latter two drought scenarios are based on gaged data and estimates of consumptive uses and losses that are called “natural flows” by the Bureau of Reclamation. Estimates of droughts prior to modern times are based on tree- ring hydrologic techniques. There is a growing scientific consensus, though, that gaged estimates do not capture the full range of potential