Description

This report focuses on seven water quality measurements taken at 43 different depths on the Bear Lake for the months of June - November in the years 2018 - 2023. These measurements create a high-dimensional dataset on which we apply state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) techniques to look for low-dimensional structure in the data. A similar effort was made for weather measurements taken near the lake. Our analysis revealed that water quality measurements tend to cluster (i.e., group together) by year, while weather measurements tend to cluster by time of the year. This suggests that the structure observed in the water quality measurements cannot be fully explained by seasonal changes, since the weather data structure is fundamentally different than the water quality data structure.

This in mind, we explored potential drivers of this strong year to year clustering in the water quality data. This included an exploration of land use change (see Appendix A) as well as an exploration of water inflows/outflows (see Appendix B). The land use/land cover analysis revealed that land use near the Bear Lake has remained remarkably stable over the past two decades, which means that land use change cannot explain the stark differences we see in lake measurements in the platform data.

In contrast, we find that a combination of max inflows from the Causeway, and max outflows from the Lifton Pumps, can explain about 50% of the variability in the position of each year within the low dimensional representations of the platform data. With only six years to compare, it is difficult to know whether or not this phenomenon is due to chance, but the discovery motivates further exploration of the lasting impact of the maximum inflow and outflows from the Lifton Pumps and the Causeway on the water quality measurements for the following year.

Contributors

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), PacifiCorp

Document Type

Dataset

DCMI Type

Dataset

File Format

.txt, .csv, .R, .png, .jpg, .rproj

Viewing Instructions

This project is organized into three separate folders: one corresponding to the results from the main report, and two separate projects corresponding to the results from the first two appendices. Each folder contains its own README to explain the contents in each folder. Further, each folder is self contained and includes all the data and code necessary to reproduce the results of that section.

Publication Date

1-3-2025

Funder

Bear Lake Watch (https://bearlakewatch.org/)

Publisher

Utah State University

Related Content

This project is associated with the following report: https://doi.org/10.26077/8842-bb09.

Language

eng

Comments

Disclaimers:

This project relied upon water quality measurements provided by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and water flow measurements provided by PacifiCorp. Each of these dataset are published with permission with the following disclaimers:

PacifiCorp: The information is provided with no representations or guarantees whatsoever including, but not limited to, its accuracy or correctness. Any person or entity using, reviewing, or referencing the draft model or associated information for any purpose does so at its sole risk.

USGS: This data is preliminary and is subject to revision. It is being provided to meet the need for timely best science. Because the data has not yet been approved for publication by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), it therefore does not represent any official USGS finding or policy. The information is provided on the condition that neither the U.S. Geological Survey nor the U.S. Government shall be held liable for any damages resulting from the authorized or unauthorized use of the information.

Disciplines

Mathematics | Statistics and Probability

License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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Additional Files

blw_project_README.txt (4 kB)

main_report_README.txt (5 kB)

appendix_a_README.txt (1 kB)

appendix_b_README.txt (1 kB)

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