Continued Scant Monsoon Moisture

Blogging has been tough the past few weeks as the weather has been pretty monotonous.  The monsoon has largely been a nonsoon for Utah (and Arizona).  

That doesn't look to change through at least Friday.  The color fill in the GFS forecast loop below is a variable known as precipitable water.  Precipitable water is a measure of the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, expressed as the depth of water if all that water vapor were condensed out.  This time of year, 12.5 mm might give you an isolated dry thunderstorms over the mountains.  Shower/thunderstorm and precipitation potential increase as precipitable water approaches 25 mm or an inch, when I start to pay closer attention.  I've picked a color scale below that transitions from light brown to green to blue around 20 mm.  

Today, we have some weak instability and moisture with precipitable water around 15 mm.  Thus, we could see a few thunderstorms in northern Utah, but nothing widespread.  Ditto tomorrow, after which even lower precipitable water predominates through the Saturday, after which we slowly climb to about 20 mm on the 17th (Monday).  

By and large, a pretty dry airmass for northern Utah in August.