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Data and Infrastructure

Existing Infrastructure
A great deal of data and infrastructure exist within the Great Salt Lake Basin and provide a rich context for water related research. The existing infrastructure, coupled with the extensive list of past and ongoing research within the basin, provide a means to evaluate the additional infrastructure required to tackle the imposing knowledge gaps regarding the volumes, fluxes, and residence times of water in the various compartments of the mountain-basin system.

Proposed Infrastructure
The overall Great Salt Lake Basin Hydrologic Observatory is large relative to the scales over which hydrologic processes have typically been investigated, but small relative to the scales over which meteorological processes are presently examined. The design of the proposed infrastructure for the Great Salt Lake Basin Hydrologic Observatory takes this into account, providing innovative ways to study the fluxes of water and contaminants among the major stores, which include the surface, subsurface, and atmosphere.



TRACTABILITY.  The Great Salt Lake Basin is tractable—the major attributes of the basin can be captured with relatively low-density monitoring to the west of the Great Salt Lake and more concentrated hydrologic and atmospheric monitoring to the east.