Wednesday, July 13, 2022

A Little Monsoon Moisture

This time of year, clouds are good.  It's hot, but without direct sun, the help cut the intensity of the heat.

Monday night, a little monsoonal moisture made it into northern Utah, increasing the cloud cover yesterday and producing a few showers and gusty winds.  Most of the precipitation evaporated, but I saw a few drops hit the ground.  

A look at the weather observations at the Salt Lake City International Airport shows the increasing moisture well.  The green line below is the dewpoint, which is a measure of the absolute water content of the atmosphere at the surface.  Values have climbed steadily over the past five days and are now just a bit over 50˚F.

The HRRR cloud and radar forecast for this afternoon shows convective storms developing over northern Utah.  


The HRRR can't reliably predict the location of convective storms, so where and when such storms develop is difficult to say, but expect some showers, thunderstorms, and gusty winds this afternoon.    

2 comments:

  1. So we can cancel the excess heat alert? Please?

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  2. Would love to see more of these monsoon posts, even if it’s not manifesting a ton yet in SLC. The science behind monsoon, how it’s changed with higher temps the last couple decades, its importance to SLC rain totals.

    Being in Sant Fe last week, we saw a spectacular show and it reminded me of the importance of monsoon in the West US.

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