Happy Friday morning, this is Casey Olsen with the Utah Climate Center.
After an incredibly wet and cool October, of which I've spoken ad nauseum about at this point, we enter late autumn with the return of warm and dry.
In terms of seasonal projections, Utah mostly remains in between areas of strong statistical signal for above or below average precipitation, which is not awesome for our confidence in going either way.
I will say that we have seen the above average precipitation signal shifts ever so slightly south and it now clips the very northern reaches of the state. I'll take what I can get.
Temperatures continue to swing on the warmer end of the distribution as well.
Looking at the short term forecast, the North will see this midweek system begin to peter out heading into the weekend. The cold front associated with that system did bring temperatures down to near normal for this time of the year.
However, looking at Saturday into Sunday, the large scale pattern will shift to a very high amplitude high pressure ridge. This means clearing out of the weather and warmer temperatures for the first half of next week.
Given our decreasing solar angles this time of year, there are air quality concerns as our air gets stagnant.
The second half of next week is much more uncertain, with the models having a hard time landing on a specific solution. Some have a decent Pacific trough that breaks down this high pressure ridge, while others show that the system really kind of splits apart before reaching us.
I'm not loving the most recent model runs either, as they are starting to push for the splitting apart solution.
At the very least, we can hope for some winds to mix out the valley haze.
Temperatures have dropped to the 50s for the North but will warm back up to the 60s as the high pressure sets in southern Utah, low elevations continue to bask in the sunshine with beautiful mid 70s.
With the Utah Climate Center, this is Casey Olsen.