Editor’s note: This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake.
OGDEN — Getting water to the depleted Great Salt Lake requires not just water but lots of data.
Water that starts in the basin’s snowpack has many stopping points before ending up in the lake since it’s used by cities, farmers, ranchers, mineral extractors, industrial companies and, well, anyone who consumes water between the mountain snowpack and lake.
Some of this data is tracked, but the agency tasked with the Great Salt Lake’s recovery — after it reached an all-time low two years ago — said it has been difficult to know if water consumption cuts upstream actually get “saved” water to the lake.
“We haven’t had as much data as we would’ve liked about what water is actually getting to the lake,” said Great Salt Lake deputy commissioner Tim Davis, as he stood by the Weber River within the Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area, near where it dumps in the lake Monday morning.
That data gap is now starting to close, thanks to a partnership between different federal and state agencies.
The U.S. Geological Survey is adding 13 new stream gauges within the Great Salt Lake Basin to monitor stream flows into the lake, through a $3 million grant from the Bureau of Reclamation. The project also includes new lake buoys to monitor water temperature at multiple lake depths that will go into calculating lake evaporation during the summer, said David O’Leary, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Utah Water Science Center.
State and federal officials gathered by a new gauge at the Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area to showcase how the system works.
Each gauge is equipped with a data-logging device contained in a small box, as well as satellite telemetry and a solar panel to keep its battery powered. The new devices will essentially help experts better track water within the Great Salt Lake basin, including from year-round or short-term donations dedicated to the lake.
The new devices will join a fleet of about 150 stream gauges that the U.S. Geological Survey operates across Utah, half of which are within the Great Salt Lake basin. O’Leary notes that all of the data should help improve forecasts for salinity levels, air quality and winter snowfall, all of which can be affected by positively and negatively depending on the lake’s levels.
“This data leads to a better understanding of how the lake functions (and) a better understanding of the lake’s ecosystem,” he said.
It also might solve a water-tracking problem brought up last year after the state allocated $200 million toward agriculture water optimization projects and $40 million toward building the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust.
Dozens of agriculture optimization projects and a little more than a dozen change applications from water rights holders seeking to send water to the Great Salt Lake have already taken place, but there haven’t been many tools to track if they’re working as intended.
Teresa Wilhelmsen, state engineer and director of the Utah Division of Water Rights, said the gauges should help improve the transparency of water savings and donations. It helps that all of the gauge data collected will be made publicly available through the U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Salt Lake Hydro Mapper, so anyone can track progress.
“Having those accurate measurements all the way down the system just ensures that we have accurate deliveries of those waters, according to the water rights,” she said. “This measurement device is just going to be key to help us get good stream flow measurements throughout the year.”
The money allocated from the Bureau of Reclamation follows similar funding efforts from the state during the 2024 legislative session.
Monday’s also event came a week after the Great Salt Lake Commission’s Office reported that the Great Salt Lake lost about 1-3 feet to evaporation over a hot and dry summer and early fall. Davis said installing gauges may seem small, but it’s a piece of the long-term goal of getting water to the lake.
“It’s going to take everyone working together for us to restore and protect the lake,” he said. “This partnership with (federal, state and other organizations) is critical for us to get the data that we need, the science that we need to make decisions for the lake.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
