Officials, advocates debate Great Salt Lake management

Charles F. Trentelman in the Standard-Examiner (Utah): A massive dust storm Tuesday turned Top of Utah gray, raised particulate pollution and served as a coincidental introduction for this year's Great Salt Lake Issues Forum. … Dozens of weather scientists, water managers, state wildlife officials and lake advocates focused on what Jodi Gardberg, Great Salt Lake Watershed coordinator at the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, called "a unique ecological gift that has to be preserved."

The lake is under assault from climate change, drought, population growth and overuse. At the same time, it is home to critical wildlife habitat, the world's largest brine shrimp fishery and major manufacturing facilities, and is a major Utah tourism draw.

While presenting the results of sometimes years of study, the speakers said over and over that they were just beginning. For example, Clay Perschon, founder of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources' Great Salt Lake Ecosystem program set up in 1996 to manage shrimp and avian life on the lake, said when he looked for research to guide his efforts, "the short of it was, there just hadn't been (research). So much of the work we had to invent as we go."

…Jim Steenburgh, chairman of the University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Sciences, said climate change will affect the snow and rain that fills the lake, but beyond knowing that there will be more warm years, fewer cold years, earlier spring runoffs and drier summers, there is no way to say how big the changes will be. "We're pretty confident in warming, but how warm is subject to investigation," he said.

…He warned to be wary of averages when trying to manage the lake. Utah weather is made up of extremes, he said, "and we spend too much time thinking about those averages when we should be thinking about these ups and downs."…

Evaporation ponds on the Great Salt Lake west of Ogden, Utah, shot by Jeff Kubina, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license