Beginning in the early 1970's, seven Water Resources Research Institutes and Centers from the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming formed an informal consortium to work on water resources problems of the Colorado River/Great Basin region. This group adopted the name the Powell Consortium on June 2, 1991 and subsequently entered into a seven state agreement to more formally articulate common goals and operating procedures. In March 2000, the institutes of the states of Oklahoma and Texas joined the Consortium. In 2007 Oklahoma moved back to the Missouri Basin States.
The Consortium is named in recognition of John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), geologist, teacher, and philosopher whose pioneering explorations of the Colorado River Basin became legendary. Like Powell, scientists from the Colorado River Basin continue to marvel at the complexity and importance of water resources and see a pressing need to promote and facilitate research and education on water resources and other important environmental issues to the region.
The Consortium utilizes the collective expertise of its member universities and over twenty other cooperating universities to develop and disseminate knowledge to solve problems of the Colorado/Great Basin Region and other arid regions of the world. As inspired by Powell, the Consortium seeks to improve the technical and scientific basis for decision making on water and environmental issues through honest investigation and the application of common sense to problem solving.
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