‘Water is complicated’: Utah looks to data-driven future for natural resources
Steve Proehl via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
The state is embarking on a management refresh for its Great Salt Lake amid competing oversight and the ever-present threat of drought. Tech and AI could help make that revamp easier.
Even though 2023 saw record snowpack, Utah is consistently one of the driest states in the U.S. and so is constantly either in drought or planning for the next one.
Indeed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently designated three counties as natural disaster areas due to the drought conditions that exist there, meaning that farmers and other producers can take on emergency loans to help them replace equipment or livestock, or refinance their debts.
On top of that, planning is already well underway to make sure the Great Salt Lake in the north of the state will remain a resilient source of water for generations to come. The Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan, mandated by the state legislature, looks to better manage supply, demand and reliability, as well as the ecology of the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere.
Technology and artificial intelligence will play a key role in shaping the Great Salt Lake’s future, but it is an enormous undertaking given the sheer number of state agencies involved in its management, as well as federal entities.
Route Fifty caught up with Summer Dawn Shumway, IT and communications manager at the Division of Water Resources within the Utah Department of Natural Resources, on the sidelines of the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas last week to learn more.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Route Fifty: In terms of challenges around water in the state, what are the things that you're up against?
SUMMER DAWN SHUMWAY: The biggest challenge is the fact that we live in an arid state, water is not infinite, and we're at the mercy of the climate and the weather. We can't predict what's going to happen exactly every season, but we do try to model and plan for the future. That's the biggest thing that we need to spend our time and energy on, to make sure that we have water for future generations.
Some of the challenges related to that directly are the different types of water use. Forever, it was just agriculture and outdoor water use. But now we have technological considerations like data centers, which require energy and water. How do we plan for the future, thinking smartly through all these challenges and what the future could look like?
Some other challenges are, we tend to have people who have their own ideas about water, and they have big feelings about them. Another challenge for us is really educating, not just the public but legislators and decision makers, what the facts are and what the real steps can be to secure our water future.
Route Fifty: What ideas do people have about water, and how do you educate them into thinking differently?
SHUMWAY: There are certain facets of people that feel like they really understand water, and then they have large opinions about water, and they're very vocal about it. Sometimes it can get in the way of progress or beneficial things that we can do, because it's misinformation, or they're not maybe fully informed.
For example, we have two catchphrases that we use all the time. One of them is, water is complicated, because it's not straightforward at all. There are so many elements that go into water resources and how we get our water. Someone might understand one aspect of it, and that forms their opinion about what they should do, but they don't know the rest of the story. There's always this balancing act to be able to really understand and manage our water supply, and there's a lot of entities involved.
Route Fifty: What's going on with the Great Salt Lake, and the management and planning there?
SHUMWAY: There's been several projects mandated by the legislature to really push forward and help facilitate progress on understanding the Great Salt Lake Basin watershed, as well as the lake itself and the ecology surrounding it. Throughout time and eternity, there's been many different facets of the management of it. For instance, Utah Forestry, Fire and State Land, which is a sister division in our department, manages the lakebed, but then water rights over the navigable waters are in Water Resources. We provide information, and we help provide data regarding the lake. The Utah Geological Survey provides a ton of data for the lake, and we work with federal partners, and that's not even mentioning Wildlife and the part they have in the ecology, and those are only just some agencies within our department. Then there's federal partners and there's other state partners in other departments.
It's so complex, and I feel that we're turning a corner right now where everyone is really trying to make a concerted effort, instead of just not being aware of what's going on. We're all really pushing to come together, because we're going to find solutions faster, and we're going to be able to come together and understand our data better if we can all focus together instead of working separately. It's still a challenge, but I've been really encouraged over the past year seeing that.
Route Fifty: What does a well-managed, healthy, Great Salt Lake look like?
SHUMWAY: You have the salinity in the lake, we have a north arm and a south arm, and the salinity levels are different in each arm. A berm was built to separate the north and the south arm to help manage the salinity levels. As the lake gets lower, the salinity levels get higher, and depending on the salinity levels, it depends on the brine shrimp, which is the core of ecology there. That's what the birds eat. That's what brings the birds, and the brine shrimp can't reproduce and survive if it's too salty or not salty enough. As the lake level lowers, there's a whole complicated grid that says the health of each part of the ecology of the lake, depending on the level. It's tricky to find that happy medium; there's tradeoffs.
Right now, there is a project called the Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan. It is a project that was mandated by the legislature. The technical portion is taking models from many different agencies surrounding the Great Salt Lake Basin and bringing them together into one model, and that is in the works. They've created 10 different teams to work on different aspects of studies and various things. Then the technical team has teams, and it's cross collaborative. It's all the managing partners that have some sort of part in it.
The difficult thing is also that we have to be patient, yet we don't have time. It's urgent. So really, being able to have Google Cloud Platform is a game changer for us, because that's helping to eliminate the silos as we are trying to work together, and it’s providing an opportunity for us to say, “Look, we have a common platform. You have a project. You need something for high performance computing. Let's work on this together.” It's been interesting to see that facilitated.
Route Fifty: What role does technology play in bringing all this data together? It sounds like a mammoth undertaking.
SHUMWAY: It is, and we're at the beginning. This time last year, I don't even think we had our subscription yet, and we were just in the middle of procuring our subscription. We're really trying to move fast, and I think that does cause some people angst when they feel like we're forcing them to use it, and that's not it at all. We're providing an answer to the questions they've been asking. We're providing an answer to the needs they've been voicing. You have your early adopters, who have been great, and they really help the others see what the possible is. I do feel like it's really starting to ramp up now, and people are really starting to see the vast number of things that are possible.
Route Fifty: The vision is, you take all this data from all these different places, throw it all into the Google system and see what you can learn from it?
SHUMWAY: In relation to the Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan, there's already models that have been created, and so it's bringing models together in a way that we can look at all the data from the lake more holistically with modeling from past data, and then also modeling for the future with predictive analytics. For that, the biggest use for GCP is the storage. The other challenge we have in Utah is that water data is not centralized, it's not normalized. You have many different agencies who have different types of data. Most folks know who to go to, to get the data from, but not always. But then there's not always agreement on how you should present that data. Another goal we have is to find an effective way to manage all our data in one place, even if different entities are producing it. How do we bring that together, not just for the Great Salt Lake, but all Utah water data? How do we make it available to all the agencies that need to use it?
Route Fifty: You mentioned you have your early adopters, people who are gung-ho about it, and people who are perhaps not. How do you bring people along with you?
SHUMWAY: I think the biggest thing is listening to them, because change is hard, especially when it comes to your workflow and especially when it comes to technology. Many of these folks who are building these models and dealing with this data are so incredibly intelligent, they're amazing, and for them to have to shift gears sometimes it's difficult. That's why we tend to, as humans in general, just revert to, we're just going to do it like this, the way we've always done it, and we're going to cobble things together just to keep it working, as you're always waiting for something to implode.
Just seeing that we have some folks that have a really hard time even considering the cloud instead of on-prem has been interesting to me. What you can do in the cloud is far beyond anything you could possibly do or fund on-prem. We certainly don't have those abilities within our agencies to maintain and deal with that. I can spin up one machine, or we can spin up 10 machines, all in the cloud. We just figure it out. We don't have to buy hardware, and I don't have to get other machines to keep machines ready, which I do for some folks right now.
Route Fifty: Do you have a timeline on the integrated plan?
SHUMWAY: I think 2026 is when the plan itself is due. They're pushing hard, and they're going to probably have some tangible things coming together by the end of this year, which terrifies me.
Route Fifty: You mentioned data centers before. Everyone wants data centers for AI, and I'm sure your legislators are just as keen as the folks in the Dakotas and everywhere else. Are you worried at all about the impact on water?
SHUMWAY: I am worried, but I also know that there's more that I can learn about data centers. I'm in the midst of digging in and I'm hoping to be able to tour some of them that are saying they've found ways to use less water. I want to know how. How does that work? But it does concern me. The strangest thing is they tend to build data centers in areas where we literally have no businesses or are even building homes, like in southern Utah. I find some of the choices that have been made odd, and that concerns me, but I think that's just part of the challenge for our division.
It's important for us to make sure that we understand what's going on, so that we can be part of those conversations and help with those decisions. We're not regulatory. I see us mainly as resources for decision-making, and resources for educating the public. We spend a lot of time educating the public how to conserve water or what that even means, but there's so much more that we need to learn and educate people about, not just simply that.
Route Fifty: Any final thoughts you want to add on water or technology?
SHUMWAY: People think conservation is a bad word in Utah now, because it's communication fatigue, so there's buzzwords. We try to call it water resiliency. We've been talking about that because the other catchphrase we use a lot is, if we're not in a drought, we're planning for the next one. It’s so people don't get too comfortable in those good water years. We need to always plan.