SALT LAKE CITY-
Denver has had blizzards. Northern Utah? Not even close. The Cache valley took an inch of snow in December–a foot below average.
Wasatch Mountain ski resorts reported a brisk holiday season, but they could use more powder, too.
“Our storm activity has been sporadic for Utah. The storms have split north and south when they come off the Pacific,” said Brian McInerney, a hydrologist for the National Weather Service office in Salt Lake City.
Just wait, however.
A storm headed toward Utah on Thursday was expected to bring more than a foot of snow to the northern mountains and clear out the foggy inversion blanketing the Wasatch Front from Ogden to Provo.
And forecasters say an El Nino storm track could arrive in Utah next week, possibly bringing sustained storms. El Nino is the name for warmer surface waters in the equatorial Pacific that can boil up big storms from the southwest.
While those storms generally favor southern Utah, the jet stream can steer them into the northern Wasatch mountains, where El Nino historically has brought some of the biggest snow years, McInerney said.
So far this winter, Utah’s mountain snowpack figures are unimpressive–72 percent of normal in the north and 85 percent in southern Utah, he said.
Yards around Cache valley are showing more grass than snow. A Logan-based meteorologist says that could mean El Nino is bypassing northernmost Utah.
“In a general sense, drier than normal weather is kind of the story that happens when we get into an El Nino cycle like this,” said Alan Moller, a meteorologist in Utah State University’s Utah Climate Center. “Not one storm this whole season has brought more than two inches of snow to Logan.”
USU’s Wellsville weather station in southern Cache valley logged a mere inch of snowfall for all of December. The average is more than a foot, Moller said.
Moller, however, is optimistic the law of averages will bring change to Cache valley.
“We should see some significant storms throughout the season at some point,” he said.
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Information from: The Herald Journal,
