Abstract
AbstractGreat Salt Lake (GSL), Utah, lost 1.89 ± 0.04 m of water during the 2012–2016 drought. During this timeframe, data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission underestimate this mass loss, while nearby Global Positioning System (GPS) stations exhibit significant shifts in position. We find that crustal deformation, from unloading the Earth's crust consistent with the observed GSL water loss alone, does not explain the GPS displacements, suggesting contributions from additional water storage loss surrounding GSL. This study applies a damped least squares inversion to the three‐dimensional GPS displacements to test a range of distributions of groundwater loads to fit the observations. When considering the horizontal and vertical displacements simultaneously, we find a realistic distribution of water loss while also resolving the observed water loss of the lake. Our preferred model identifies mass loss up to 64 km from the lake via two radial rings. The contribution of exterior groundwater loss is substantial (10.9 ± 2.8 km3 vs. 5.5 ± 1.0 km3 on the lake), and greatly improves the fit to the observations. Nearby groundwater wells exhibit significant water loss during the drought, which substantiates the presence of significant water loss outside of the lake, but also highlights greater spatial variation than our model can resolve. We observe seismicity modulation within the inferred load region, while the region outside the (un)loading reveals no significant modulation. Drier periods exhibit higher quantities of events than wetter periods and changes in trend of the earthquake rate are correlated with regional mass trends.
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Published Version
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