8/28/2023 0 Comments Salt flats utah imageThis was surprising, Skiles says, because the Great Salt Lake’s dry lakebed is tiny compared with the exposed surfaces of neighboring dust sources, such as the much bigger West Desert, a dry landscape west of Great Salt Lake. It also released the most dust relative to the lake’s exposed surface area. After calculating where the dust came from during each storm based on wind direction and atmospheric conditions, the team found that Great Salt Lake contributed nearly a quarter of the total dust to the study site. The team collected snow samples from a plot adjacent to Alta Ski Resort and found that storms deposited substantial amounts of dust 16 times during the 2022 snowmelt season. So she and colleagues investigated whether the increase in dust was related to consecutive years of record-low water in the Great Salt Lake ( SN: 4/17/23). That means people can’t accurately predict when snow runoff will happen so they can use water efficiently.Īs an avid skier, Skiles noticed the slopes near Salt Lake City looked especially dirty in 2022. But current forecasting tools don’t account for the impact of dust, Skiles says, which absorbs sunlight, speeding up snowmelt. More than half the municipal water in Salt Lake City comes from four streams that drain snow out of the Wasatch Mountains. In arid parts of the western United States, snow acts as a natural reservoir. It also affects the region’s ski areas, which contribute more than $1.5 billion per year to the local economy. An earlier, faster snowmelt may alter the water supply for the 1.2 million people who live in the region, as well as ecosystems downstream, says McKenzie Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
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