Watershed Symposium 2022

Watch this panel discussion on YouTube

The Great Salt Lake has shrunk to the lowest levels ever recorded. Utah's journalism community has responded by combining resources to cover the story together as the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. Newsrooms that normally compete are sharing stories about the lake—and embarking on joint reporting projects to discover what solutions exist to the problem of drought, climate change, and over consumption of water in the West. A team of reporters from the Collaborative recently traveled to California to learn how communities around Owens Lake and Mono Lake responded to the crisis facing those lakes. Loss of in-flows turned Owens Lake into a dust bowl and the largest source of dust pollution in the United States. Mono Lake faced the same fate until a nonprofit secured its right to exist.

The panel will cover what the reporters learned about how Utah could mitigate dust from Great Salt Lake's dry lakebed, the lessons Utah could learn from the legal fight for Mono Lake, and how the communities around Owens Lake and Mono Lake are finding solutions to mitigate the loss or reduction of those lakes. How (if) we can apply the lessons learned in California, what the obstacles might be here in Utah, and potential solutions as we grapple with the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

Learn more in the Great Salt Lake Collaborative's "At Water's Edge" story map, which illustrates the challenges at Owens and Mono lakes and how they can inform the future of the Great Salt Lake, as well as the full series of articles and reporting.

Groundwater levels in Utah and throughout the west continue to decline. Groundwater is an important resource providing water not only for human consumption but also for agricultural and industry needs. In order to preserve this valuable resource we need to increase our efforts to put water back into the ground.

In 2005, Utah declared Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) as a critical element in most conjunctive management practices as part of their “Utah State Water Plan”. In 2017, Governor Herbert commissioned a Recommended State Water Strategy where public comments included ““Vigorously pursue … aquifer storage and recovery projects.” yet few ASR programs have been implemented since. Recently, in the 2021 Water Resource Plan ASR and other managed aquifer programs received little attention. This presentation will cover the increasing water challenges and drought situation in Utah and surrounding western states due to in large part climate change. The presentation will also discuss the successes and challenges of existing and potential ASR programs in Utah. Attendees will understand how climate change is affecting our groundwater resources and what solutions should be considered in the long term to protect this valuable resource

This presentation will feature current work of Provo and Eagle Mountain to address water scarcity through their aquifer storage and recovery efforts and include examples of mapping social, jurisdictional, and economic factors to assess infrastructure and population vulnerability from impacts of climate change.

Our climate is changing, Utah and the west are in the midst of one of the worst droughts on record, and citizens are asking about what can be done to prevent it from getting worse and how to adapt. Lake Mead and Powell are at their lowest levels on record and Utah’s reservoirs are rarely full. Some organizations and industries are being proactive on this front and preparing for extreme drought that threatens our water supplies and fuel wildfires and on the other end extreme storm events that lead to flood damage, erosion and sediment clogging our infrastructure and filling our reservoirs. Others are overwhelmed by the possible extent of impacts. Cities, counties, and watershed districts are addressing this difficult issue in many ways. From dealing with unprecedented drought and water scarcity to flood events to developing adaptation plans, Utah cities and watershed districts along with others across the nation are being proactive through planning for the future of their water supplies, while also addressing the challenges of extreme damaging and erosive flood events.

This presentation will feature current work of Provo and Eagle Mountain to address water scarcity, and contrast this with what several watershed districts in other parts of the country are doing to address volatility in precipitation events. Examples include increasing efficiency in the management of groundwater and surface water sources, rethinking how we store water by using aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) instead of surface water reservoirs, aquifer sustainability planning, facilitating climate resilience workshops with local communities for them to plan for upcoming changes from storms, floods, heat, and warming winters. The results of these workshops have been incorporated into City Comprehensive Plans and resulted in multimillion dollar ASR projects. Other examples include mapping social, jurisdictional, and economic factors to assess population impacts of climate change, infrastructure vulnerability studies, and designing plant community restorations prepared for invasive species encroachment. This presentation will provide several examples of climate adaptation projects initiated by cities in Utah and watershed districts from other parts of the country.

Linking how annual variability in climate drives 2-3 year changes in streamflow, resulting in a multi-year response of GSL volume.

When in drought, it is especially pertinent to understand how much water is available, where it is available, and when it will be available for down-stream water users and for ecological impacts on large scale ecosystems such as Great Salt Lake (GSL). Headwater catchments are the primary water suppliers and storage regions for Great Salt Lake water supplying tributaries. These catchments hold snow at high elevations and release that snowmelt as seasonal providers to seasonally recharge Great Salt Lake. Along with seasonal controls from snowmelt, headwater catchments hold water within the catchment subsurface and slowly release water throughout the dry season and into the following subsequent years, buffering lake levels even during low snow years, or exacerbating reductions in streamflow input when catchment storage is below average. This project addresses the challenge of predicting Great Salt Lake levels, and begins to address the upstream processes that lead to high or low GSL levels. Using over 118 years of historical streamflow and climate data in 10 headwater tributaries to the Jordan River and Weber River (both terminating in GSL), we identify a surprising multi-year periodicity in headwater catchment storage. This multi-year periodicity of high and low storage in the headwaters is positively related to 3-4 years of antecedent precipitation, and 2-3 years of antecedent seasonal melt rate. The previous year’s temperature is negatively related to catchment storage, suggesting that in in warmer years, headwater storage is depleted. We also find that catchment storage is directly related to GSL elevation, where high storage results in high GSL lake level, and low storage results in low GSL elevation, there seems to be a 2–3 year lag time in this relationship, suggesting that headwater catchments storage may respond at a faster time scale (1-4 years) to snowpack and temperature variability, but GSL may respond to climate patterns over a longer timescale. These findings suggest that GSL is controlled by multi-year climatic patterns that first control streamflow totals in headwater catchments and subsequently control how much water is available for runoff into GSL.

With Great Salt Lake dessication, Northern Utahns have expressed worry about the effects of dust storms on air quality and health. We present dust flux and geochemistry data for the Salt Lake Valley, and investigate possible sources of specific metals within dust, as well as the current limitations of environmental health evaluations of dust.

The Salt Lake Valley, UT, USA, home to more than 2 million people, is situated proximal to the drying Great Salt Lake and to the east of other dry playas. Prior work has found that these playas contribute dust to snowpack in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains to the east of the cities, and that dust contain high relative abundances of trace metals like Pb and Cu. However, no prior study has characterized the contributions of geogenic dust and industrial particulate pollution to communities along the Wasatch Front. In this study, we analyzed the dust deposited in 18 passive samplers positioned near the Great Salt Lake, Ogden, Bountiful, the Salt Lake Valley, and Lehi for total dust flux, the < 63 μm dust fraction, 87Sr/86Sr, and trace element geochemistry. We observed the highest dust fluxes at wealthy exurban sites near the western boundary of the urban area. Within the urban corridor, strontium isotope ratios and the spatial distribution of trace elements suggested that Great Salt Lake playa dust contributes only a small amount of material to dust in urban areas. Instead, based on the < 63 μm dust fraction, our results suggest the contributions of local soil disturbance. In our data, many trace metals exceed EPA Regional Screening Levels for soil (As, Co, Cu, La, Li, Mn, Ni, Tl, and U) and exhibited enrichments relative to both upper continental crust and playa dust collections. This suggested the direct contribution of particulate pollution via industries like Cu mining, concentrating and smelting, and oil refining, as well as historical pesticide and herbicide applications. Bulk ‘priority pollutant’ relative abundances did not track income, race or ethnicity demographics. However, certain elements (As, V) indicated a statistically significant positive correlation with income, whereas Pb, Tl and Ni indicate enrichment in the least wealthy and least white neighborhoods. Findings from this study suggest the importance of understanding constituent-specific loadings from particulate matter and dust in urban areas influenced by industry.