Dusty Convection Outflow

I wish I could say I'm glad to be back in Utah, but the aridity and dust leave much to be desired.

Yesterday at around 2000 MDT strong outflow wind from convection north of Salt Lake City picked up dust and briefly caused a spike in PM25 in some areas of the Salt Lake Valley.  Below is a photo of the dust looking south from the upper Avenues at 2007 MDT.

Observations from the University of Utah show a spike in PM2.5 to almost 40 ug/m3 at 2020 MDT.  

Source: MesoWest

There's a good chance that the exposed bed of the desiccating Great Salt Lake was a contributor to some if not most of the dust in this event.  

Amsterdam

We made it back to Salt Lake City today (Wednesday, July 8).  We stayed a few days in Amsterdam on the way home.  It's a little known fact that I was born in Amsterdam (Amsterdam, New York, not the big one in The Netherlands), so I always wanted to visit my hometown's namesake.  

Amsterdam (the one in The Netherlands) is a real bike-friendly and bike-oriented city.  "Parking lots" are full of them.  

Spending time in Europe makes you realize that US cities are really built for cars not humans.  

I am a fan of Dutch painters and did enjoy spending some time at the Rijkmuseum.  A lot of paintings caught my eye, but two that had a weather or climate theme are below.  The first was Dutch Ships in a Calm Sea by Willem van de Velde II because he did such a great job with the clouds.  

The second was Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp because it's related to winter!  

Dutch canals still freeze over sometimes, but it has become less common in recent decades.  Such a shame.

I hope to get into blogging about Utah weather again soon. 

Bye Bye Innsbruck

Andrea and I left Innsbruck on the 1st of July and are working our way back to Salt Lake.  For our last day in Innsbruck we actually went to Germany.  Mittenwald to be specific, which is just across the Austrian-German border.  

We were beat from hiking so we needed an easier day.  The train ride from Innsbruck to Seefeld, Mittenwald, and finally Garmisch-Partenkirchen if you go that far is a really wonderful ride.  The ascent out of Innsbruck offers many great views of the Inn Valley and Kalkogel Alps, pictured below.  

The train is almost always filled with hikers and cyclists.  It's easy to throw your bike on in Innsbruck and take it up to Seefleld or one of the surrounding villages for a good ride.  Long mountain bikes in the the Karwendel Alps are also possible.  

Austria invests in their children.  They have a strong public school system and provide a lot of great opportunities.  We were joined on the train by about 30 students from a local primary school.  These three were super excited about where they were going (Seefeld).  Public transit in Austria makes such trips easy.  

Mittenwald is about an hour from Innsbruck.  It's has a bit of a more Bavarian feel, although that's not dramatically different from the Tyrolean culture of Innsbruck.  It's a touristy town but worth a short stroll and maybe a stop for lunch.  

Alternatively, Mittenwald is probably a good place to base out of for a few days if you want to visit Seefled and Garmish-Partenkirchen which are short train rides away and offer various hiking, biking, and cable-car adventures. 

We elected to take a ride on the Karwendelbahn, which is a short walk from the Mittenwald train station and rises something like 1200 vertical meters at about a 40 degree angle from town.  It's the 2nd highest cable car in Germany. 

There's a brewery at the top (this is Germany after all) and some hiking and klettersteig (a.k.a. via ferrata) options.  There are great views of the Karwendel and Bavarian Alps. 

There is also a tunnel.  The skiing from the top of the cable car is pretty much a no-fall zone.  Apparently in the 1970s someone got the crazy idea to bore 450 meters through solid rock to allow people to safely walk to another part of the mountain from which one can *sometimes* descend safely to the valley below.

There's no magic carpet like at Snowbird, so you just walk for a few minutes and eventually reach the far side.  There was no beer in the refrigerator (I checked).  

It's adventuresome terrain at the end of the tunnel too, but I guess it goes.  I'm not sure how often once can ski continuously to the valley floor in today's climate.  Probably not frequently. 

We eventually returned to Innsbruck and did some meandering through the streets that afternoon and the following morning before departing.  I took pictures of a few things you won't see in Utah. 

First, is the sidewalk tobacco vending machine.  Chew and cigarettes right at  your fingertips.  Ah, freedom!

Acutally, one of the the few annoying things in Tyrol is smoking.  Cafes and restaurants allow it outside and it's no fun when someone lights up at the table next to you.  That said, there has been a noticable decline in smoking in Innsbruck since we lived here in 2019, which was greatly appreciated during our stay over the past four months.  

On the healthier side, the photo below shows a free sunblock dispenser.  This thing measures and reports the UV index and will spit out a bit of sunblock on your hand if you stick it in the big hole. 

The base is an exhibit of the "climate stripes" made famous by Ed Hawkins and show the increase in annual global mean temperatures (blue cold, red warm).   The Innsbruck and Tyrolean governments recognize that climate change is real, caused by humans, and want to encourage change before their glaciers and snow culture are gone.  It was refreshing to be somewhere that recognized what was at stake.  

Our final moments in the Alps were dark and rainy.  Tyrol was shedding tears and was sad to see us go.  We were sad to leave Tyrol.  

We will be back!

Escape to the Dolomites

During the European heat wave we decided to escape to higher altitudes and spent a long weekend in the Dolomites, basing out of Wolkenstein in Gröden/Selva in Val Gardena, which is about 3 hours from Innsbruck by regional rail and bus.  Wokenstein/Selva is in South Tyrol (Süd Tirol in German) and was part of the Hapsburg Empire and "County of Tyrol" for more than 500 years.  After World War I, South Tyrol was annexed by Italy.  Under Mussolini, there were efforts to "Italianize" the region.  Cities were given Italian names and both German and Italian names are used today.  

Following WWI, South Tyrol has had a complicated relationship with Italy, but today is an autonomous region with considerable self-governing powers.  It is also one of the wealthiest regions of the EU with low poverty rates.  Many people in the region are multilingual, speaking German, Italian, English, and in some cases Ladin, which is still spoken by some families around the Dolomites.  

Wolkenstein/Selva is at 1500 meters, about 1000 meters higher than Innsbruck and while we were there we also observed cooling thunderstorms each afternoon.  It was a bit like hiking in Colorado.  Rise early, bag a summit, and retreat to the valleys by early afternoon. 

A morning summit of Sass da Ciampac with the atmosphere quickly destabilizing over the Sellagroupe.

In the winter, you can do a lift-served ski circuit around the Sellagroupe (pictured above), which is known as the Sellaronda. In the summer, enough lifts are run to enable a mountain bike Sellaronda, which is done most commonly with e-bikes using a day pass that costs 67 euro.  We weren't biking, but we bought the pass and spent a day doing what I called a "Quarter" Sellaronda involving about 15 km hiking and 10 lift rides, going from Wolkenstein to Sass Pordoi and back.  It's a nice way to cover a lot of ground and beats riding the busses.  

Hiking from the top of the Ciampinoi cable car to Passo Sella.  

The village of Canazei from the trail between the Pian Frataces cable car and Passo Pordoi

Piz Boè, the highest point in the Sellagroupe from near the top of the Sass Pordoi cable car

Our route also involved an excursion up the infamous 2-person Forcella cable car, also known as the "coffin lift."

The cable car is described on one web site as a two seater, but that's laughable since there's no sitting in that contraption.  You are just packed in there like a sardine with your partner.  

Getting on and off this thing involves commitment.  It is not a detachable and you have to jump in from the back.  Two lift ops start yelling encouragement to you as the lift approaches and you grab a handle as the lift goes by, spin, and jump in.  Your riding partner is a bit farther down the line and does the same thing a second later.  If you don't move fast enough, the lift ops shove you in.  Then they lock you in for the ride.  Videos were not allowed, but at great risk to personal safety, I was able to smuggle one out of Italy.

The Dolomites are very popular, but there are some areas that are really overwhelmed by the social-media crowd.  One day we decided to do a loop hike from the top of the Col Raiser cable car.  We began by ascending Seceda Alm (alm is pasture in German), whic was covered in flowers, green as Ireland, and offered some otherworldly views.  

Church in Seceda Alm

Sassolungo from Seceda Alm

But the real attraction here are the views of the Odle Group from the Mt. Seceda ridge line.  

It turns out this is probably the most popular trail in the Dolomites with many people taking the Mt. Seceda cable cars to just below the ridge.  A round trip on these is 76 euro, so we avoided them, but it should have clued us in that something was up.  When we got to the top, it was a mass of humanity, Due to overcrowding and littering, there is now a 5 euro charge to access one section of the ridge trail.  I couldn't help but think of the Yogi Berra quote, "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded." We bypassed the queue and elected to hike elsewhere. 

Lesson learned!

Getting back to funner aspects of the weekend, when we arrived at our guest house there were a lot of ski trophies and photos including a bib from Salt Lake 2002.  It turned out the place was run by a real ski-racing family and the husband, Alan, competed for Italy in the slalom during the 2002 games (sadly a DNF). More recently, their son Max won two golds and one bronze at the 2023 Junior World Championships.  Hopefully they will be returning to Salt Lake in 2034. 

Some Updates

Great to see that temperatures in Salt Lake City have been quite pleasant the past couple of days.  Below is the time series from the University of Utah and after 90+ on Friday the 26th, temps have been below 75 since and as low as the low 40s.  

But I was sad to see that three firefighters were killed responding to the Knowles Fire in western Colorado.  Such a tragic reminder of the danger that wildland firefighters face every day. 

Meanwhile here in Europe the heatwave has started to abate.  I was told that Innsbruck set an all-time record high on Saturday of 38.7C/101.6F (the old record was 38.5C).  We were out of town and at higher altitude so fortunately didn't experience it.  That's not as bad as observed in France and Germany and a few other lower-elevation areas that were above 40C/104F.  

Today (Tuesday, June 30) was our last full day in Innsbruck.  We have a short vacation before returning to Utah for the latter two-thirds of Hothouse July.  We look forward to being home and seeing family and friends, but this is a hard place to leave.  

 

The Threat to Eagle Point

The blog posts are coming fast and furious now as weather and climate extremes are having a big impact on several regions and in particular on wildfires in Utah.  

I woke this morning in Innsbruck and learned of the Cottonwood Fire that is burning and spreading explosively in the Tushar Mountains east of Beaver.  Utah Fire Info reports that it was discovered on Monday (June 22) and it has already burned 31,000 acres with 0% containment.  The most recent mapping from Utah Fire Info puts the eastern perimeter across the crest of the Tushar Mountains and the northern perimeter into the Eagle Point Ski Resort area.  Such mapping doesn't capture local details, so we can only hope that the homes and infrastructure there are still safe.  

Source: https://utah-fire-info-utahdnr.hub.arcgis.com/

Yesterday afternoon's Aqua/MODIS imagery from NASA shows a dense plume of smoke extending eastward from just east of Beaver, across the Tushar Mountains, Sevier Plateau, Capital Reef National Park, and San Rafael Swell.  Look closely and you can see a couple of white spots just downstream (east) of the Tushars that are likely produced by pyrocumulus clouds fueled by the intense heat and moisture fluxes from the fire.  My guess is that the updrafts producing these began upstream (west) of the Tushar Crest and grew in depth as they moved downstream, eventually producing the overshooting tops evident in the satellite imagery east of the Tushar Crest.

The explosive growth of the fire is really apparent in yesterday's satellite imagery.  This should be required viewing for anyone who wants to play with fireworks, light a campfire, or do other activities that can potentially cause a spark and eventually grow rapidly into a massive fire.  

Source: https://weather.cod.edu/satrad

There are only a couple of observing sites in that area that I could find.  One is the Beaver 15E site operated by the Utah Climate Center.  This is speculative and requires confirmation, but during the day yesterday the temperature at that site spiked to 110F, far hotter than the previous day and possibly a reflection of the intense heat from neary wildfire.  It appears that it survived, at least for now.  

Source: Mesowest

The wind sensor at that site appears to be DOA, but a bit to the north, Pacific Corp operates the Kays Meadow site.  That site illustrates well the meteorology that contributed to yesterday's explosive fire spread.  At around 1600 MDT, the RH was below 10% and winds gusted to 50 mph.  

Source: Mesowest

I'm not sure if that site was in the fire perimeter yesterday as it is close to the edge in the mapping on Utah Fire Info.  Also unclear is the degree to which those winds reflect the background flow or fire-driven flows.  Others with better data who are smarter than me will need to evaluate that as well as the accuracy of the wind sensor.  

Hope that some progress can be made through Thursday, because the forecast thereafter is very problematic.  The Euro for example brings a deep trough into the northwest United States and the forecast for 0000 UTC 27 June (1800 MDT Friday) shows the associated cold front over northwest utah with the Cottonwood fire area in strong, dry, southwesterly flow at 700-hPa.  

The NWS has already highlighted the critical fire weather conditions expected on Friday and Saturday.  

Source: NWS.  Downloaded 0153 MDT Wednesday 24 June 2026.

Update: 1130 MDT Wed June 24

KSL now reporting that Eagle Point was destroyed.  

https://www.ksl.com/article/51539013/cottonwood-fire-destroys-southern-utah-ski-resort

A sad loss, but let's hope there are no fatalities.