Utah’s trademarked “greatest snow on earth” may be getting dirtier — and melting faster — due in part to dust blowing off newly exposed lakebed from the shrinking Great Salt Lake.
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. It also affects the region’s ski areas, which contribute more than $1.5 billion per year to the local economy.
In arid parts of the western United States, snow acts as a natural reservoir. More than half the municipal water in Salt Lake City comes from four streams that drain snow out of the Wasatch Mountains. But current forecasting tools don’t account for the impact of dust, Skiles says, which absorbs sunlight, speeding up snowmelt. That means people can’t accurately predict when snow runoff will happen so they can use water efficiently.
As an avid skier, Skiles noticed the slopes near Salt Lake City looked especially dirty in 2022. 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).
2023-07-03 06:00:00
Source from www.sciencenews.org