CRUSTAL DEFORMATION AROUND LAKE MEAD, NEVADA-ARIZONA DUE TO CURRENT DROUGHT OF 2022

Lake Mead – the largest US reservoir by volume – has been facing the effects of a devastating prolonged drought, which causes the lake water levels to plummet. This research aims to model the crustal loading/unloading deformation caused by drought in 2022 around the Lake Mead region. We use surface water level changes from the archives of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River Operations Region Records to estimate surface mass load decrease and model its unloading effect on surface deformation. Observations from continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) are also used to compare with the modeled results. Our preliminary results indicate that the modeled deformation in the vertical direction due to the reduction in mass load within the reservoir is smaller than the GPS measurements. There is a strong correlation between our modeled and the observed crustal deformation from soil moisture and the Lake at the station P006. The observed discrepancies between the GPS observations and modeled results using soil moisture from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) model suggests there could be other hydrological components that are yet to be included in our model, but are also experiencing mass loss/migration due to the drought, such as groundwater. As the next step, we will further investigate the groundwater impact on the loading deformation. Also, we are working on using radar remote sensing techniques to analyze the crustal deformation in this region. We will compare the deformation generated from the analysis of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) dataset with deformation from the GPS observations for investigation of any discrepancies.