Ahead of Utah’s 2025 Legislative Session, the Great Salt Lake Strike Team released its updated assessment of Utah’s famous, but imperiled terminal lake, highlighting the progress that has been made to reverse the lake’s decline driven by long-term drought and unsustainable water depletions.

Unveiled Tuesday, Jan. 14 at the Thomas Monson Center in Salt Lake City, the report also called on the state to expand its air-quality monitoring network to cover parts of the populous Wasatch Front most affected by dust blowing off exposed lakebed.

“The state’s multi-year data-driven strategy can serve, dedicate and deliver water to the lake is on track. Challenges remain and it’s going to be a long march,” Natalie Gouchner, a University of Utah business professor who directs the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, told a capacity audience.

The Strike Team is a collaboration of technical experts from Utah’s research universities and state agencies. Its latest report emphasized four critical points:

• Benefits of the lake – Utah receives numerous economic, ecological and human health benefits from the lake, so the costs of inaction remain significant.
• Making progress – The state of Utah continues to make meaningful progress, including water conservation, infrastructure investment, statutory and regulatory reforms, berm management, and other actions.
• Long-term endeavor – Managing salinity and protecting economic, human, and species health will require many years of stewardship leading up to the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and beyond.
• Utah’s plan – Later this month the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner’s Office will release the 2034 Plan for a Healthy Great Salt Lake. 

Presentations were offered Tuesday by University of Utah professors William Anderegg (biology) and Kevin Perry (atmospheric sciences); Ben Stireman, deputy director of the Utah Division of Forestry Fire & State Lands, who addressed the lake’s fluctuating salinity levels; and David Tarboton, director the Utah Water Research Laboratory.

The lake will likely need 770,000 acre-feet of additional inflows each year to restore it to a healthy level within 30 years, said Tarboton, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Utah State University

Anderegg, who directs the U’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy, noted the effects of climate change on the lake, which go beyond consecutive years of drought prior to the wet winter of 2023.

“Temperature is increasing in northern Utah due to a changing climate and it’s risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the early 1980s,” he said. “Temperature matters for water because higher temperatures evaporate more water from soils, from plants and from lakes and reservoirs.”

Over the past 40 years, inflows from the Bear River, Weber and Jordan rivers have declined.

“This is a pretty substantial signal of human depletions,” Anderegg said. Agriculture remains the main user of water that would otherwise reach the lake. Its use of water has continued to rise over the past two decades, while municipal and industrial uses have remained flat over this period even as the region’s population has doubled.

“We see a slight rise [in water use] in the 2010s, but then we see actually a decline in this water use in part due to conservation and reining in our water use in dry years,” Anderegg said. “It tells us we can grow in Utah and not use more water. We can be innovative, we can conserve and still shepherd and use our water resources wisely. Likely we’ll have to conserve more to restore a healthy lake level.”

Despite the lake’s rebound, its level remain below what is needed ensure the lake’s long-term health. Scientists pegged that level at 4,198 feet above sea level, or 6 feet above today’s elevation. Of pressing concern is the 800 square miles of exposed lakebed that could become a major source of dust pollution for the 2.5 million people living along the Wasatch Front, according to Perry.

He articulated a strong case for expanding the state’s network of monitors to measure and collect PM10, particulate matter smaller than 10 microns in diameter. The majority of airborne lakebed dust reaches into Davis, Weber and Box Elder counties, but the state has no PM10 monitors there, leaving a critical data gap.

“We know that it’s a potential health hazard,” Perry said, “but we don’t have the data to actually be able to answer the question to what extent people are being exposed to the dust and whether or not that causes an immediate health hazard or a long-term health hazard. So there’s still work that needs to be done.”

Perry’s research has identified four “hotspots” on the lakebed that emit dust.

“It’s the Jordan River, Weber and Bear river that deliver those silt and clay small particles, so it’s not surprising that we have more proclivity for dust in Bear River and Farmington bays,” he said. “Luckily, about 75% of the lakebed is covered in a protective crust, which means that much of the lake is not a dust source. But we need to do everything we can to protect the natural surface crust.”

Existing dust monitors are situated in Salt Lake County to the south of the lake, which receives only about a quarter of the lake’s wind-born sediments. The bulk heads into the northern counties, and some of the dust may contain carcinogenic elements that have accumulated in certain spots in the lake.

“You need real-time monitors that can tell you the hourly concentrations so that you can see if you’re having an immediate impact,” Perry said. “But you also need filter-based monitors that can monitor the composition of the dust to see whether or not those metals are being transported to the surrounding communities.”

In Southern California, by contrast, officials have placed numerous dust monitors downwind of the Salton Sea and Owens Lake, which have much less exposed lakebed than Great Salt Lake and far fewer people living nearby.

“They have a very different strategy for monitoring the dust,” Perry said. “They have a number of monitors that are at the periphery of the lake, and then also additional monitors in the surrounding communities trying to understand the transport of that dust to the communities that are most susceptible to dust.”

• Brian Maffly Science writer, University of Utah Communications
  801-573-2382 brian.maffly@utah.edu