GREAT SALT LAKE STRIKE TEAM

INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES HAVE CARRIED THE BAD NEWS: GREAT SALT LAKE IS THREATENED BY A NUMBER OF FACTORS, INCLUDING HUMAN ACTIVITIES, DROUGHT, AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

With its various water environments, remote islands and shorelines, Great Salt Lake includes Utah's highest density of wetlands which provide habitat for plants, brine shrimp, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, shorebirds, and waterfowl. More than 10 million birds rely on the Lake, a critical link in the Pacific Flyway between North and South America.

To head off the shrinking of the Lake and its ecological collapse, the 22-member Great Salt Lake Strike Team was assembled and in 2023 produced its first policy assessment, executive summary, and presentation. The worst consequences, the report stated, can be avoided by raising the lake level to around 4,198 feet, a level that “is deemed ‘beneficial’ for most uses.” Filling the Lake up to that level in 10 years will require an inflow of more than two million acre-feet per year. One acre-foot is the volume of water that would cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, equivalent to 325,851 gallons. On average, since 2000, the Lake receives around 1.6 million acre-feet from its primary tributaries, the Bear, Jordan, and Weber Rivers, every year.

Atmos researchers were and continue to be critical members of the Team and include Kevin Perry, John Lin, and Court Strong.

Kevin Perry has spent hours on the drying and shrinking bed of Great Salt Lake, testing patches of the Lake surface for potentially toxic metals and trying to understand the recipe for dust storms. The exposed lakebed has created conditions for storms of dust laden with metals (including arsenic) that now threaten two million people. This new hazard, which adds to the already (frequently) polluted air of valleys along the Wasatch, including Salt Lake where oil refineries, a power plant, and a gravel mine exist and whose emissions get trapped by surrounding mountains. “We have 2.5 million residents along the edges of the Lake,” Perry reported to NBC News. “These dust plumes come off and make the air unhealthy regardless of what’s in it.”

Another Strike Team member, Associate Director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy John Lin has over 20 years of experience researching the emissions and transport of greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollutants. His research group carries out greenhouse gas and air quality observations in the Salt Lake City area, as well as in the Uinta Basin. He also works regularly with satellite observations from NASA to determine carbon emissions from cities around the world. As a member of the Strike Team he is tasked with synthesizing broad scientific knowledge, measurements, and observed trends to inform policy decisions surrounding Great Salt Lake. Pollutants such as black carbon, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter, he says, “tend to be higher in lower-income neighborhoods, places with minoritized populations.”

One of those vulnerable areas is Salt Lake City’s west side, which is more exposed to dust plumes from the dry lakebed.

While Perry and Lin have trained their sights on air pollutants, climate scientist Court Strong's research group studies processes involving the atmosphere and cryosphere, which is the frozen part of the climate system including our region’s mountain snowpack. They analyze observational data and simulate climate change using models run on powerful supercomputers. His team works, in part, to improve precipitation and temperature predictions through statistical downscaling with machine learning. “Downscaling is essential to producing high-spatial-resolution data desired for forecasts and to support research in other earth science disciplines,” says Savanna Wolvin, a graduate student in Atmos advised by Strong. The relationship of precipitation and temperature with elevation in complex terrain, predicted using a convolutional neural network, is critical to understanding the processes of replenishing the Lake through natural means (as opposed to countermanding water diversions).

Mountain meteorology, statistical modeling, machine learning, and climate variability are at the center of the work being done by Strong’s research group in this area.

The formation of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team signifies a significant milestone in Utah’s endeavors to tackle the intricate challenges confronting the Lake, and Atmos researchers are clearly on the first line of defense. As emphasized by Brian Steed, Great Salt Lake Commissioner and co-chair of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, the restoration journey demands a coordinated, data-driven strategy. The Strike Team plays a pivotal role as catalyst to that strategy.