An Impressive Record Aloft

Yesterday afternoon's sounding from the Salt Lake City International Airport recorded a 700-mb (~10,000 ft) temperature of 7.8ºC.  This is the highest 700 mb temperature ever recorded between December 17 and March 21 and in line with what we typically observe in mid June.  I've annotated the observation on the sounding climatology below to show how anomalous the temperature is for January.  The red trace represents the highest 700-mb temperatures at each of the twice-daily sounding times during the year.

Source: SPC

Perhaps not surprisingly, Alta set a record high for the day of 58ºF.  This beat their previous record of 43ºF for the date by 15ºF!

Source: NWS

That's a huge trouncing, but the previous 43ºF record for yesterday was the lowest maximum temperature record during January (tied with Jan 3rd).  The record for the entire month of January remains 59ªF, set on January 12, 1996 and January 20, 2005 (the latter noted above).  Thus, the max temperature at Alta yesterday was pretty damn impressive, but not an all-time record breaker for the month.  

Valley showers and mountain snowshowers are on tap for today and tonight and possibly a bit tomorrow.  This looks to be a sporadic, hit and miss event and the models continue to flounder around on accumulations, but continue to call for a modest event.  Through late tomorrow, the 6Z NAM is going for about 3 inches at Alta, whereas the 6Z GFS is in there for 7.5 inches, with most of this falling this afternoon and tonight.  I'll stick with 3–6 inches for a storm total as that seems to be in the heart of the distribution and I'm not sure how much to weight the new high-res GFS for mountain precipitation.