Water budget over land cover classes in the Great Salt Lake basin.

This resource holds water budget data over land cover classes used in the MS Thesis:
Ghimire, B., (2025), "Investigating Changes in Hydroclimate, Land Cover, and Evapotranspiration across The Great Salt Lake Basin and its Major Subbasins," Civil and Environmental Engineering, Utah State University.

It contains Python code and coordinates of representative points for each land cover class, that were obtained by sampling grid points to sufficiently represents each class. These representative points were used as inputs into the ClimateEngine API to retrieve precipitation, evapotranspiration, daily mean air temperature, and potential evapotranspiration for each land cover class across the Great Salt Lake subbasins. The data for these variables were then averaged over the water years from 2004 to 2021 and are shared in the resource. These data were used to analyze water yield, defined as the difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration, which indicates the amount of water available for streamflow or storage in the basin. Additionally, total evapotranspiration, considered as a surrogate for water use from different land cover classes, was estimated. This analysis helps to understand how various land cover types influence water availability and usage within the basin.