OGDEN — A major snowstorm will hit Utah today and last through the weekend, but Top of Utah probably won’t get much more than a good dusting of snow out of it.
The storm was flowing out of the Pacific Ocean over the weekend and through southern California on Monday and Tuesday.
U.S. Weather Service hydrologist Brian McInerney said it would slam into central and Southern Utah today, with successive pulses through the weekend.
Heavy snow warnings were issued for an area south of Provo all the way to the Arizona border and for the eastern two-thirds of the state and parts of Wyoming.
Travel along the Interstate 15 corridor is expected to be hazardous.
However, McInerney said, “most of the energy is going to miss Northern Utah. We’re going to see some systems come through, but no game-changers. It will keep the air cleaner, which is nice.”
Davis County and points north, he said, will see enough of the storm to give the area average snow for this week in the year. The chance of snow for both today and Thursday is 60 percent, with accumulations of about an inch in the valleys each day.
Average snow means as much snow will fall this week as normally does this week, on average, every year.
That means the total snowpack in the Weber Basin watershed will stay about the same, between 70 and 80 percent of normal.
The chance of snow on Friday, Saturday and Sunday will taper off to 30 percent, with another smaller storm pulse going through the state.
Temperatures in Top of Utah will get up to the low 30s through the weekend, with lows in the low 20s.
McInerney said that, after Monday, the weather service’s extended computer models indicate conditions for another thermal inversion in the valleys could settle in, allowing the air to collect pollution again.
However, he added, those are just computer models. He generally refuses to make predictions of the weather beyond five days.
The one bright spot, McInerney said, is that the sun is rising higher in the sky as spring gets nearer.
The increased angle of the sunlight warms the air more, causing it to mix better and prevent inversions from taking place.
Comments