Water experts working to help after Utah’s warm, dry October
Nov 1, 2024, 6:39 PM | Updated: 7:16 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah just had an unusually warm, dry month. Cities across the state set records for their warmest October ever. It adds to current concerns for our drought, and real worry about the ripple effect on the Great Salt Lake.
How do you manage the water, when there’s less to go around, to keep the water levels high? Right now Utah water experts are working on a tool to help them do just that.
A hot October isn’t what state experts said our Utah rivers and reservoirs need.
“Warmer temperatures are going to increase withdrawals from the hydrologic system,” said David O’Leary, Director of the Utah Water Science Center.
Watching our water flow and what it means for Utah’s drought is what David O’Leary does for the U.S. Geological Survey. He and other state water experts worry about what warmer dry months mean long term.
“It certainly is concerning, we’d like to keep water in the system here in Salt Lake City,” O’Leary said.
The state drought coordinator agrees, saying it’s hard to respond beyond the current season.
“We don’t know what we’re going to get, we can only know what we’ve been, we can only be careful with what we have, because we don’t know what we’re going to get,” said Laura Haskell, Drought Coordinator for the Utah Division of Water Resources.
That’s why O’Leary and his team have been working on creating a computer model that will soon allow them to plug in endless data from water flow to how much we consume, simulate climate conditions and predict what to expect years ahead.
“Then you can take that calibrated model and use various climate scenarios or management scenarios and look 5, 10, 20 years in the future,” said O’Leary.
He believes knowing what water we’ll have tomorrow can help Utah better manage what we have today.
As you can imagine, creating a computer program that can predict the future takes a long time to program. The Utah Water Science Center has been working on it for the last two years and is planning to release it in late summer or early fall next year.
