Topic > Great Basin Province Review

The Great Basin physiographic province is the largest desert region in the United States and has been described as an important dust source area (Prospero et al., 2002). The details of bottom-up controls on dust dynamics in this part of the Intermountain West are beginning to be resolved (Hahnenberger and Nicoll 2012, 2014). This is important because dust storms that increase levels of particulate matter (PM) negatively affect air quality in populated areas, contributing to acute and chronic health impacts, as well as traffic accidents, power outages, forest fires, reduced visibility due to dust blowing. , and other hazards (e.g., Pope, 1991; Pauley et al., 1996; Griffin and Kellogg, 2004; Malek et al, 2006; AZDPS, 2017). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Dust storms are known to deposit dust particles on mountain snowpack (West and Steenburgh, 2010); Skiers call the powder that adheres to the surface of the snow “snirt.” Dust-On-Snow (DOS) can influence the chemistry of major and trace elements of the snowpack (Arens, 2010; Carling et al., 2012; Reynolds et al., 2014, 2016). Dust-containing snow in northern Utah can have element concentrations up to 5 times higher, compared to dust-free snow (e.g. Carling et al., 2012). The composition of DOS layers in the Wasatch Mountains has been shown to influence surface reflectance (i.e., albedo) and radiative properties of the snowpack (Reynolds et al., 2014). Dust layers can also affect slope stability, cause avalanches and increase melt rates of mountain snowpack. DOS in mountain areas of the Colorado Plateau causes early melt and a “snow-free” date of up to a month, contributing to conspicuous water flows (Painter et al., 2007; Painter et al., 2010). Hydroclimatic changes caused by the dust could have a greater impact on regions that rely on seasonal snowpack for their main water supply, such as the Salt Lake Valley along the Wasatch Mountain front. Here we document the “Black Tuesday Storm,” as it was called in the press, which occurred on April 14-15, 2015, the period when American Americans are due to file their taxes. This intense frontal system crossed the eastern Great Basin and produced strong winds and a dust storm, which deposited a fair layer of dust on the snowpack of Wasatch Mountain near Alta, Utah. This storm caused PM 2.5 levels to reach 8 times the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area and along the Wasatch Front, where most of the United States' residents reside. Utah. We analyzed the coincidence of this strong intermountain cyclone with a dust event day (DED) and an associated dust deposition on snow (DOS) event. We sampled this single layer of dust at 2824 masl immediately after the storm, allowing a direct analysis of the stratigraphy related to the DOS event and avoiding the effects of time averaging and integration due to freeze-thaw processes of the snowpack. In this article, we 1) describe the synoptic and local meteorology as this frontal passage (frop) caused a dust storm that adversely affected downwind air quality; 2) document the mobilization of dust observable from specific point sources on MODIS images; 3) explain the aeolian transport of dust from the source-to-sink deposits of the basin into a mantle layer.