Great Salt Lake Accounting Analyst (GSLAA)

Get evidence-based answers to Great Salt Lake water, elevation, conservation, agriculture, and policy questions

Purpose

The Great Salt Lake Accounting Analyst (GSLAA) is a public analytical tool that helps people understand what is happening to Great Salt Lake—and what proposed solutions could realistically accomplish.

GSLAA applies the Great Salt Lake Accounting Standard (GSLAS) to public datasets, published research, current events, and proposed water actions. It distinguishes water conserved or dedicated on paper from the amount that can be expected to physically reach and remain in Great Salt Lake.

Open the Great Salt Lake Accounting Analyst

Questions GSLAA Can Help Answer

GSLAA can answer everyday questions about the lake as well as detailed questions from researchers, journalists, policymakers, water professionals, farmers, and community members.

Try asking:

  • Will the Great Salt Lake disappear?
  • How much water has the Great Salt Lake lost?
  • Why is the Great Salt Lake shrinking?
  • What is causing the Great Salt Lake to drop so fast?
  • Is drought or human water use causing the decline of Great Salt Lake?
  • How much water does Great Salt Lake need each year?
  • What would it take to raise Great Salt Lake to 4,198 feet?
  • Can Utah refill Great Salt Lake before the 2034 Winter Olympics?
  • Which actions would have the greatest impact on Great Salt Lake elevation?
  • How much water could lawn-watering conservation deliver to Great Salt Lake?
  • What effect do lawns and park strips have on Great Salt Lake?
  • How does agriculture affect Great Salt Lake elevation?
  • How much agricultural water could realistically reach Great Salt Lake?
  • Why do farmers in the Great Salt Lake basin grow alfalfa instead of less water-intensive crops?
  • Would agricultural water optimization increase Great Salt Lake inflow?
  • How much water would a specific conservation project, water right, lease, donation, or policy action deliver to Great Salt Lake?
  • Is dedicated water actually reaching Great Salt Lake?
  • Which Great Salt Lake water projects are measurable and durable enough to be considered bankable?
  • What do recent Great Salt Lake acquisitions, legislation, and water policies mean for the lake?

Users can also ask GSLAA to build or reconstruct Great Salt Lake water ledgers from the published datasets.

From Water Savings to Lake Accretion

Many public claims begin with the amount of water diverted, conserved, funded, purchased, leased, or legally dedicated. Those numbers do not necessarily show how much additional water reaches the lake.

GSLAA traces each claim through the complete accounting chain:

Diversion
  → Depletion
  → Dedicated Water
  → Terminal Delivery
  → Incremental Lake Accretion
  → Lake Elevation and Storage Response

This approach helps prevent water-use reductions, modeled depletion savings, administrative credits, and maximum legal quantities from being mistaken for demonstrated annual lake inflow.

Built from the Great Salt Lake Accounting System

GSLAA draws upon the Great Salt Lake Accounting website, the Great Salt Lake Accounting Standard, machine-readable public datasets, the 2025 municipal and industrial water-conservation opportunities study, and the 2026 agricultural water-optimization study.

For current projects and developing news, GSLAA can also consult recent external sources and then evaluate those claims using the same accounting rules. Its answers separate:

  • demonstrated accounting findings;
  • analytical inferences;
  • assumptions and uncertainties; and
  • policy considerations.

Designed for Transparent, Reproducible Analysis

GSLAA can explain its sources, boundaries, units, periods, assumptions, and calculations. When asked to build a ledger, it reconstructs the requested table from the underlying datasets rather than simply repeating a published result.

The analyst is especially useful for comparing proposals that describe their benefits in different ways. It provides a common structure for asking not only how much water an action might conserve, but how much of that water is protected, measurable, durable, and capable of producing additional Great Salt Lake inflow.

Important Limitations

GSLAA is an analytical and educational tool. It is not a forecasting model, legal opinion, water-right determination, or substitute for field measurement and professional review.

Some questions cannot yet be answered with a single demonstrated quantity. When evidence is incomplete, GSLAA identifies what is known, what remains uncertain, and what additional measurement or documentation would be needed to establish a defensible Great Salt Lake benefit.

Ask the Great Salt Lake Accounting Analyst

← Data & Datasets | Conclusions →

© 2026 GSL Accounting · Version 1.1 (August 2026). Content may be shared or cited with attribution. Built by humans with AI assistance for data validation and drafting, and grounded in public data; analytical judgments and conclusions are the authors’ own. See the Changelog for revision history and archived change notes.