Episodic Dust Events of Utah’s Wasatch Front and Adjoining Region

Abstract

AbstractEpisodic dust events cause hazardous air quality along Utah’s Wasatch Front and dust loading of the snowpack in the adjacent Wasatch Mountains. This paper presents a climatology of episodic dust events of the Wasatch Front and adjoining region that is based on surface weather observations from the Salt Lake City International Airport (KSLC), Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) imagery, and additional meteorological datasets. Dust events at KSLC—defined as any day [mountain standard time (MST)] with at least one report of a dust storm, blowing dust, and/or dust in suspension with a visibility of 10 km or less—average 4.3 per water year (WY: October–September), with considerable interannual variability and a general decline in frequency during the 1930–2010 observational record. The distributions of monthly dust-event frequency and total dust flux are bimodal, with primary and secondary maxima in April and September, respectively. Dust reports are most common in the late afternoon and evening. An analysis of the 33 most recent (2001–10 WY) events at KSLC indicates that 11 were associated with airmass convection, 16 were associated with a cold front or baroclinic trough entering Utah from the west or northwest, 4 were associated with a stationary or slowly moving front or baroclinic trough west of Utah, and 2 were associated with other synoptic patterns. GOES imagery from these 33 events, as well as 61 additional events from the surrounding region, illustrates that emission sources are located primarily in low-elevation Late Pleistocene–Holocene alluvial environments in southern and western Utah and southern and western Nevada.