It's a Trough!

It will take a while to get here, but a bonafide trough will be coming to Utah for the weekend.

Before that, we're going to be in the so-called warm-before-the-storm (in this case a dry frontal passage with dust) with a ridge building over Utah today.

The ridge will be followed by the development of warm southwesterly flow ahead of the trough later in the week, as illustrated by the GFS forecast below for 0000 UTC 21 June (6 PM MDT Friday).

Although yesterday's high was "only" 87 and this morning was pleasant, our July like weather returns for the rest of the work week with NWS forecast highs for the Salt Lake City airport of 92 today, 102 Thursday, and 96 on Friday.  Critical fire weather conditions will be in place for much of this period.

Saturday is a transition day with the front forecast to be moving over northern Utah at 0000 UTC 22 June (6 PM MDT Saturday).  

Depending on your location and exposure, this looks like a recipe for dust Friday and Saturday in both the pre-frontal environment and the post-frontal environment.  Salt Lake City could see some wind-blown pre-frontal dust from origins to the south and southwest ahead of the front and then from the exposed Great Salt Lake once the front is through.  Good times.  

Once the dust has settled (pun intended), Sunday looks very pleasant with valley highs in the mid 70s.  It looks like a good day for a hike, but bring a couple of layers if you are going to higher elevations. Our GFS-derived forecast guidance for Little Cottonwood is calling for 34F at Alta-Collins (9600 ft) and 31F on Mt. Baldy (11,000 ft) at 9 AM and afternoon temps in the high 40s and high 30s, respectively.  

Essentially No Change in the Status Quo

This afternoon (Thursday July 12) I heard a few claps of thunder in the Aves with a very brief shower that didn't quite fully wet the sidewalk.  It was about the most exciting thing to happen weatherwise in a while.

The last day with measurable rain at the Salt Lake City International Airport was May 25th, 18 days ago.  Hot and dry will be the weather story for the foreseeable future.  Nearly all members of the Utah "Snow" ensemble are showing nothing over the next seven days, although there is a member or two that pops up a stray shower here or there (look hard to see if you can find them). 

So, maybe we get lucky, but for the most part, as promised a few days ago, June is the new July.  At least the humidity is low.  

An Early Start to July

Yesterday's high at the Salt Lake City International Airport was 90.  The NWS forecast for today is also 90 and every day through next Sunday has forecast highs in the 90s.

Source: NWS.  Downloaded 0802 MDT 9 June 2025.

These are July-like highs, although the nighttime mins in the 60s may make things a bit more tolerable.

That said, I'm not a fan of long stretches of July-like weather in June.  It often makes summer unbearably long.  Let's hope the latter half of the month is cooler.

The End is Nigh

Both the Atwater and Snowbird SNOTELs look like they will hit the end of the snowcover season today or tomorrow.  

The Atwater site is across from Alta Ski Area.  This is a relatively new site with only a few years of data, so don't read too much into the median or range of prior data.  It currently sits at 0.3" of water equivalent, which for all intents and purposes puts it at zero today.  

Snowbird sits at 1.9", but it has been a flaky site all season and only declined from 2.2 to 1.9" yesterday, which makes little sense, but it's not unusual to see some odd observations when the snowpack is near the end.  

Regardless, it looks to be done by tomorrow or the day after that at latest.  

These are of course point observations, so there's still going to be some snow out there, but as far as the SNOTEL observations are concerned, this is the end of the snow season in the central Wasatch.  

First Day of June is Like July

 As I type this on Sunday afternoon (June 1), the temperature at the Salt Lake City International Airport is about 92°F at 2 PM.  The record for the day is 94°F, so we have a solid shot at tying or eclipsing that.  A high of 94 is also consistent with the average high for July 11, so we're getting a too early taste of mid summer.  

Fortunately a weak cold front is coming through tomorrow morning.  Tomorrow afternoon will be more pleasant than today with cooler, drier, northwesterly flow.  

Right now it's looking like the frontal passage will probably be a dry one in Salt Lake.  The NWS forecasts give us the not quite zero possibility of a shower or thunderstorm: "A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms before midnight, then a slight chance of showers between midnight and 3am."

Hopefully we see something, although my expectations are for nothing.  At least it will be cooler tomorrow.  

Signs of the Times

These are minor issues compared to what many are dealing with, but yesterday I received two e-mails that are reflective of the times. 

In the first, I was notified that a proposal I submitted to a NOAA Weather Program Office competition was recommended for funding.  Normally this is good news, but this year, that news was accompanied with the caveat that they probably won't be able to find funding.  

That would be a shame because we were planning on using deep learning to further advance the the techniques approaches we've been developing to improve snow density and snow amount forecasting.  Many of the products on weather.utah.edu and features on this blog use experimental versions of these techniques.  Without support, this line of research will probably whither in the coming months as our current grant winds down (and this assumes that funding is not frozen). 

In the second, I was notified that I was eligible for the Voluntary Special Retirement Program at the University of Utah. You know you are getting old when you get one of these.   

The U has been tight lipped about their plans to address the HB 265 Strategic Reinvestment Plan.  They recently posted an online news article on @THEU that basically said little other than they presented a draft of phase one of the reinvestment plan to the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE).  Presumably this special retirement program is a small part of that.  

Based on that article, I suspect we will learn more in the near future, certainly no later than June 6 when plans are to be presented to the Utah Board of Education.