Happy Holidays to my fellow Utahns. This is Casey Olsen with the Utah Climate Center.
We may need to sing the popular song, "Let it Snow" a little louder, because I don't think the weather is hearing us. As Thursday's weaker system departs the region, the next few days show another series of warmer and wetter storms impacting the northern portion of the state.
As our high pressure ridge flattens out Friday, we'll see the arrival of a decaying atmospheric river pooling in moisture from the Pacific, bringing valley rain and mountain snow. This will come in pulses, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.
Given the predominantly westerly flow, we may see some decent, high density snow totals over the north, south oriented ranges, definitely something to keep mine for travel impacts this weekend.
For the northern valleys, like Cache Valley, we see temperatures flirting with frozen precip early Saturday morning, but I'm not holding my breath for anything sticking around.
For those traveling, I think the safest bet is plan on winter driving conditions generally for mountain passes this weekend, as even the warmest part of the event will only raise snow levels up to about 8500 feet or so, though a lot of the passes are well below that.
By next week, we'll see a general lull in the weather with warm sprinkles here and there from the lingering moisture. We do see the return of an active pattern by next Wednesday, though, before everyone gets excited about a white Christmas, I'm going to be a grinch and say we're just looking way too warm for valley snow at this point. The weather models don't account for Christmas miracles, however, so maybe we'll get lucky.
Temperatures for northern valleys will dip into the mid 40s Saturday before jumping up to the 50s by next week. Southern Utah misses out on the action yet again, remaining sunny and in the low 60s.
With Utah Climate Center. I'm Casey Olsen.