Researchers warned the Great Salt Lake could dry up in 5 years. Now, they’re being mocked. Read Part 1.

Editor’s note • This is the first installment of a three-part series in partnership with Utah Public Radio exploring a widely publicized warning about the health of the Great Salt Lake and whether the two wet winters that followed have rescued the body of water from harm’s way.

Part 1 • ‘The best available science’

On her way home from Antelope Island State Park one afternoon a few months ago, naturalist Trish Ackley was greeted by a sunset reflecting on a revitalized Great Salt Lake brimming with life.

“There was not more than a 4-inch gap between any one bird that I saw on the lake,” Ackley said, “and I couldn’t see an end to that.”

She had missed this sight. Back in 2021 and 2022, the waterline had receded so far from the causeway that it was hard to spot any wildlife at all.

Now, the water was back. With it came the birds. And while Ackley knew the lake and its inhabitants may remain in peril, at least for that moment she felt a sense of calm.

This is far from the haunting picture described in a startling report published by Brigham Young University in early 2023. In that 34-page paper, a team of dozens of researchers and activists warned that “excessive water use is destroying Great Salt Lake.” If nothing changed, they predicted, “the lake would be on track to disappear in the next five years,” resulting in the spread of “toxic dust” across the region.

The lake’s surface elevation had been in a period of general decline for decades, but the acute specificity of the report touched a global nerve, with headlines across the world echoing the staggering warning.

The report dropped just weeks before the Utah Legislature was to meet for its annual session, and nearly every news story highlighted — and its authors reiterated — the immediacy of action needed. That session, 14 bills were proposed to support water conservation and investment aimed at saving the lake from collapse. Nine passed.

Within months, however — after a veritable snowpocalypse hit much of the state — the lake’s seemingly dire fate appeared to have dramatically shifted. The winter of 2023 brought desperately needed relief, with snowpacks exceeding records across much of the 27,000-square-mile basin surrounding the Great Salt Lake. As the snow melted, the lake rebounded to a yearslong high that left some skeptical of the report — and others publicly contemptuous of it.

Last spring, after another anomalously snowy winter, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox declared the five-year warning had been “laughable.”

“It’s a joke, and everybody knows it’s a joke,” Cox told National Public Radio. “They were never serious about that.”

But the report’s authors were indeed serious. And Ben Abbott, a professor of aquatic ecology at BYU and the paper’s lead author, said they still are. He stands by the decision to publish.

“We were in a place,” he said, “where we had to make decisions based off of the best available science.”

What he and his collaborators didn’t account for was chaos.

‘It is our responsibility’

The three major sub-basins that flow into the Great Salt Lake — the Bear River, Weber River, and Jordan River catchments — had been in a low-level drought since the turn of the 21st century, largely due to gradually diminishing snowpacks in the mountains of northern Utah. But the severity of that drought had spiked significantly in the years before the BYU report was published.

From summer 2020 to summer 2021, almost all of the Great Salt Lake’s watershed was in drought, peaking with about 80% of the region in exceptional drought, the highest classification used by the National Integrated Drought Information System. While the severity began to diminish in fall 2021, the area remained in a substantially heightened state of dryness for much of the following year.

The last time the lake’s surrounding counties had experienced such an intense drought was in 1977, although that spike in dryness was shorter. The most comparably severe and lasting drought happened back in the 1930s.

It was these conditions upon which the authors of the BYU report based their much-publicized warnings. From the start of 2020 to the end of 2022, they estimated, the lake had lost about 1.2 million acre-feet of water each year, leading to a record-low lake elevation of 4,188.5 feet above sea level. According to estimates developed by U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Casey Root, that elevation translates to about 5.2 million acre-feet of salt water left in the lake.

From there, the math was simple enough.

“I got asked a lot, ‘Is it really five years?’” said Lynn de Freitas, a co-author of the report and the executive director of the nonprofit group Friends of Great Salt Lake, which was founded in 1994 to advocate for the lake’s preservation. “And the timeline is interesting, because it’s actually from that trajectory downward that was extrapolated from the data. You could follow the line, how it was going down, and just continue the line and ask the question: ‘How long before we get here?’ And that was five years.”

When she realized that, de Freitas said, something struck her.

“It is our responsibility as people who study the lake to tell the public,” she said. “It would not be ethical for us to not disclose that we were seeing that crisis in real time.”

So, on Jan. 4, 2023, the authors released their report to the world.

That afternoon, a warm front pushed into northern Utah, bringing with it a light snowfall in the ranges surrounding the Great Salt Lake. In the tiny town of Brighton — home to the state’s oldest ski resort and one of the longest continuous records of mountain precipitation — 4 inches of snow fell.

Over the next two days, a deep area of low pressure that had been hovering above the Pacific Ocean began to crawl across the continent, triggering heavy rain and snow in California, then Nevada, then Utah. During the next week, Brighton picked up 34 more inches. By the end of the month, the town had been buried under more than 11 feet of snow.

“We were so happy for the snow to come, so happy to have that moisture, knowing the effects on the Great Salt Lake,” said Barbara Cameron, a longtime resident of Brighton who couldn’t remember anything remotely like that winter. “But then it just kept coming. And it just kept coming. And the shock hit when we saw a neighbor’s garage had collapsed, and then there was a home under construction that collapsed. Chimneys were sliding off roofs and caving in, balconies were collapsing. There was just so much snow.”

That wasn’t happening only in Brighton. By season’s end, snowfall records going back a century had been smashed across the Great Salt Lake watershed.

And the lake was already rebounding.

‘It’s hard to say’

The relentless series of storms of early 2023 were unexpected.

Before that winter, the North American Multi-Model Ensemble, which estimates meteorological trends from one to five months ahead of time, showed no strong indication that the coming winter would be substantially wetter or drier than usual, but it did estimate an above-average likelihood of increased temperatures across the region.

Average rain and snow but increased heat would mean more evaporation, so the forecast was hinting at a small chance of below-average snowpacks — an outcome that would indeed have extended and worsened the acute drought that had begun in 2020.

The model has been in use since August 2011, meaning researchers like Ben Kirtman, who led its creation, have had a little more than 13 years to assess its accuracy. And in many places in North America, it’s been strikingly good — “skillful” is the word modelers use — offering simulations of coming temperature and precipitation patterns that turn out to be close to what happens a season or two into the future.

In the Southeast, where Kirtman is a researcher at the University of Miami, the model is quite skillful at predicting fall and winter rainfall. Over time, it has gotten gradually better at predicting coming winter conditions across the broader South, as well as precipitation in the Pacific Northwest. But if there’s one place where it and other models still struggle, it’s the region surrounding the Great Salt Lake — the northern Mountain West.

That lack of skillfulness is mainly due to two factors.

The first is the influence of atmospheric rivers — long plumes of concentrated moisture in the sky that emanate from the tropics and flow across the ocean without impediment until reaching the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain ranges, where air currents rising over the mountains cause the streams to release much of their moisture.

For the purpose of medium-range forecasts — time spans of up to about 10 days — the emanation, strength and location of these rivers in the sky has become increasingly predictable through the use of powerful computer simulations. Past that, however, scientists haven’t had much success predicting whether a coming period will be heavy with atmospheric rivers and, if so, where those streams might meander.

The other compounding challenge is ocean temperature. Seasonslong phases of warmer and cooler waters in the tropical Pacific — El Niño and La Niña, respectively — have been shown to be strongly correlated to temperature and precipitation patterns in two areas of the U.S. West.

A persistent El Niño is strongly predictive of a colder and wetter winter in the Southwest. A persistent La Niña usually indicates a coming cold and wet winter in the Northwest. But sitting between those regions is a band of states — including Nevada, Utah and Colorado — where connections with tropical ocean temperatures are liminal.

“And so it’s hard to say we can truly have very decent prediction skills,” said Siyu Zhao, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

For the winter now underway in northern Utah, the simulation suggests a higher probability of warmer temperatures but offers little clarity on how much precipitation is expected. In some ways, it looks like the forecast that came ahead of the historically wet winter of 2023. But that doesn’t necessarily mean another snowpocalypse is on its way.

‘One flap of a seagull’s wings’

High-snowpack winters here have sometimes coincided with strong El Niños. Other big snow years have come during persistent La Niñas. The record-setting winter of 2022-23 came during a transition away from a yearslong La Niña, while other such shifts have brought high snow years, low snow years, and average snow years in the region surrounding the Great Salt Lake.

Climate scientists call such situations “stochastic,” meaning the patterns of weather are subject to myriad, unseen and random oceanic and atmospheric influences.

For half a century, this phenomenon has been known as “the butterfly effect,” a name derived from a research presentation delivered by mathematician and meteorologist Ed Lorenz at a scientific conference in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 29, 1972. In that talk, Lorenz asked fellow scientists to consider whether “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” could “set off a tornado in Texas.”

For years before that lecture, however, Lorenz had invoked a different creature to make his point. “One flap of a seagull’s wings,” he wrote of his early ruminations on the stochasticity of meteorological systems, “would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.”

Lorenz’s work would become foundational to the field of chaos theory, which is based in part on the notion that while the present always determines the future, even very close approximations of the present will often fail to approximate anything close to the future.

In the past half-century, atmospheric scientists have come to learn that some places are simply subject to more chaos than others. One of those places is a state that happens to have made the seagull its state bird: Utah.

In other words, there was no way the report’s authors — or anyone, for that matter — could have seen the snowpocalyptic winter of 2023 coming.

But the opposite was equally true: There was also no evidence that 2023 was likely to be another devastatingly bad water year.

Coming in Part 2 • Even if 2023 had been another dry year, could that trend really have continued, again and again, until the lake was dry?

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.

Matthew D. LaPlante is a climate scientist and associate professor of journalism at Utah State University. He is a former staff reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune and the host of the science-themed program “UnDisciplined” on Utah Public Radio. The show will release three episodes to accompany this series.

LaPlante is the co-author, along with Piyush Dahal, Shih-Yu Simon Wang, Kirsti Hakala, and Avik Mukherjee, of the peer-reviewed study “A ‘nuclear bomb’ or just ‘a joke’? Groundwater models may help communicate nuanced risks to the Great Salt Lake,” which was published in the journal Water on Aug. 6. None of the individuals quoted in this series was involved in the study.