Good evening. This is Casey Olson with the Utah Climate Center.
I saw my first precipitation in the rain gage for the first time in over a month. But notice my choice of wording here. I said saw precipitation in the gage, rather than measured, because there have been maybe a total of six drops in there. But hey, this is looking like signs of changes ahead.
On that note, we finally turned on the moisture tap, with a favorable large scale pattern for the northward movement of moisture from Mexico. In other words: the monsoon.
This is looking to be a deeper layer of moist air, as opposed to our last shallower plume that only brought in significant cloud cover and a little moisture making its way to the ground.
In fact, southern and central Utah will need to look out for deeper convection that could bring flash flooding risks to certain areas.
While the most concentrated action will linger down south, the north will see convection to showers, hopefully enough to wet our extremely dry soil.
With that dry soil and vegetation, fire risks remain especially high with lightning. On the brighter side, the longer term presence of moisture will drop our daily highs by the weekend.
Model confidence appears high for the large scale pattern to remain locked in with a high pressure dominating the Western US.
However, uncertainty is introduced looking at moisture beyond Monday. Hopefully we can squeeze out a few more raindrops out of the next week.
Temperatures remain hot along the Wasatch in the upper 90s until cooling down to the upper 80s by Sunday, at about 10 degrees to that for the southern elevation, so still cooking down there.
With the Utah Climate Center. I'm Casey Olson.
