OGDEN — A common winter weather phenomenon for the Wasatch Front has parked itself in Northern Utah and may take some time to dislodge.

An inversion layer has been causing dense fog since Sunday evening throughout the region’s valleys, including the Ogden area.

Glen Merrill, hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s Salt Lake City office, told the Standard-Examiner on Monday: “We’ve been noticing, especially the last couple days around the shorelines and adjacent valley areas of the Great Salt Lake, is that overnight and early morning dense fog development. That’s because the inversion has persisted, and it’s a strong inversion. The influence of increased moisture from the lake has aided this dense fog development.”

He said some areas have seen visibility drop below a quarter of a mile at times, which has affected air traffic in the region.

“With this dense fog, Salt Lake International Airport has seen impacts,” he said. “Only certain planes can land when visibilities get below half- or quarter-mile of visibility. … (Sunday) there were multiple planes that had to be diverted from the Salt Lake airport and certainly times where planes have to circle above the terminal.”

Merrill said the weather has also lead to a drop in air quality throughout the region.

“Pollution levels have also been on the rise the last several days because this inversion event has been persistent for multiple days now,” he said.

He said that it could be sticking around as the Christmas holiday draws nearer.

“What we need to break out of an inversion is essentially a storm event,” he said. “We need a storm event to bring in cooler air — colder than what we actually have on the surface now. We’ve got some very weak storm systems moving overhead over the next couple of days, but they’re not expected to really significantly improve the inversion conditions. It’s probably not until we get about five days out as we start approaching Christmas, it does look like we could see a stronger storm event that would have more of a potential of helping to mix things out and maybe bring a little bit of rain and snow as well.”

Whether this particular storm will bring a white Christmas to the lower elevations in Northern Utah is also up in the air.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty with that,” Merrill said. “If you live in the higher elevations — for sure. It’s really tricky for the valleys right now. This next storm we’re expecting leading into Christmas is going to start on the warmer side, so more likely beginning as rain. There is a potential as we get into Sunday in Northern Utah that we could see a little bit of light snowfall, but certainly not a large snow storm the way it’s looking right now.”

Newsletter