I haven't seen actual numbers though. If you have them, I'll listen.
We also have this disconnect in the debate around water in California. You could stop watering every almond grove in the state and that wouldn’t change anything about major urban water supplies, because the watersheds aren’t related.
From the paper “ Agriculture dominates water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed (Fig. 5)25,26,69. Irrigation of alfalfa and other crops directly accounts for around three quarters of total consumptive water use…”
Agricultural diversions of stream water that would otherwise go to the Great Salt Lake account for 74% of the water used.
Industrial and mining, 18%, evaporation 8%, and cities and residential use 8%.
This isn’t like California.
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366876763_Emergency...]
Next question: Does anyone have statistics on how much of the precipitation in that watershed is due to the "lake effect"? (For those not in the know: When storms cross the Great Salt Lake, they pick up evaporation, which increases the precipitation of the storms when they get to the Wasatch Mountains. That precipitation then flows - or would flow, if not diverted - back into the lake.)
If the lake dries up, so does the lake effect. That could reduce the amount of precipitation that we get. If it's a major effect, it could be big trouble for the environment and the economy.
Evaporation has been decreasing as salinity increases and surface area have been shrinking, and total precipitation has been staying roughly the same.
Which makes sense - most inflows are via precipitation on several large mountain ranges nearby (and relatively infrequent storms), and unless air movement was limited/locked to be solely within the great salt lake basin (in which case precipitation should be noticeably dropping, but it isn’t), the air volumes from daily evaporation would only rarely overlap with the air volumes causing the large rain and snow storms in the mountains.
Definitely still some effect though! And worth asking about for sure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake_effect