The Great Salt Lake Strike Team issued a report today that serves as a resource for the 2023 General Legislative Session. The full report is available here. It's a little unfair to call it a report as much of the document is a visual summary with bulleted lists and highlights, which makes the key findings very accessible.
Perhaps the most important insight is a clear summary of the causes of the record low lake elevation. The largest contributor is human consumptive use, with declines in precipitation and runoff efficiency and increases in direct evaporation from the lake due to climate warming smaller contributors.
As I often say, we have met the enemy, and it is us. In the short term, finding ways to reduce human consumptive use is probably the most important policy lever for getting water to the lake. The report recommends that we should leverage wet years to do this, and it was good to see that they highlight that this year, given our relatively healthy snowpack, represents a significant opportunity.
Given how well laid out and succinct the report is, I refer you to the report for additional insights and recommendations.
I haven’t yet read this new report, but if I’m not mistaken this last year’s record low water level broke the previous low lake level measured and marked in July of 1847 by Mormon scouts. At that time I think it’s safe to say human diversion from the lake was negligible. I can’t argue the fact that the only place we hold control regionally is to change and adjust our usage and diversion of water from this terminal basin in times of drought. I think I can reasonably argue that this is by and large a consequence of drought (i.e. fewer storms/less precip) primarily and consumptive usage and increases in evaporation hold less effect than seem to be indicated by the findings of the report… which I will now read;)
ReplyDeletePer Nicoll (2021), the earliest known elevation observation for the Great Salt Lake is from 18October 1847 and lake levels were near 4200 feet. See Figure 4 at the link below.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kathleen-Nicoll/publication/350568075_What's_New_About_the_Old_Bonneville_Basin_Fresh_Insights_About_the_Modern_Limnogeology_of_Great_Salt_Lake/links/60665e22299bf1252e2135e5/Whats-New-About-the-Old-Bonneville-Basin-Fresh-Insights-About-the-Modern-Limnogeology-of-Great-Salt-Lake.pdf
A solid and nicely presented summary. Pretty hard to escape the conclusion that in order to address the issue, something will have to happen on the agriculture front.
ReplyDeleteYour own excellent post on cloud seeding effectiveness seemed to suggest bottom line is about 1.5% increase. This report says "Program evaluations in Utah suggest cloud seeding could produce an average annual increase in snowfall between 4% and 13%." Hmmm
ReplyDelete