SALT LAKE CITY — A pair of storms headed to Utah aren’t expected to create too many issues, but they should snap an abnormally dry start to December for the Beehive State.

A system off the California coast is forecast to generate more rain and snow in two waves across the Wasatch Front and northern Utah between Thursday night and Sunday morning. However, KSL meteorologist Matt Johnson says weather prediction models project that both will likely be “losing steam” as they move east, so totals may not be impressive.

The first wave is forecast to arrive in Utah between late Thursday and early Friday, bringing in snow showers across the Wasatch Front and northern Utah. It’s projected to leave a trace to about an inch of snow in the valleys and benches across Utah’s northern half. The Wasatch Backcountry could end up with a couple of inches, while mountain locations may end up with 2 to 6 inches.

A second wave is also forecast to pass through this weekend, providing more of a rain-snow mix between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Higher accumulations are possible with the second wave, but National Weather Service snowfall forecast models updated Thursday morning project most mountain areas may end up with less than a foot of snow by 5 a.m. Sunday.

“Neither of these look too strong,” Johnson said.

Full seven-day forecasts for areas across Utah can be found online, at the KSL Weather Center.

Breaking a trend

While likely small, both storms would still provide some of the first moisture during what is normally one of Utah’s wetter months.

Salt Lake City has yet to officially receive moisture this month, though it normally receives about 1.4 inches of precipitation in December. The same goes for valley communities across the state, according to National Weather Service data.

A cold front system that broke a long-standing inversion last weekend failed to produce much moisture. Mountain locations are also off to a slow start to winter. One of the weather service’s Alta sites, which normally receives nearly 28 inches of snow in December, has only received 4 inches of snow a few days before the month’s midway point.

It follows what ended up being a warmer and drier meteorological fall than what Utah normally receives, per federal climate data released earlier this week.

The National Centers for Environmental Information reported that — with an average statewide temperature of 52.1 degrees — this year’s meteorological fall was Utah’s third warmest since at least 1895. The final average was 1.1 degrees off a record set in 1963 and 0.1 degrees off another unseasonably warm fall in 2001.

It was also the state’s 33rd driest fall in 130 years. The state averaged just 2.4 inches of precipitation during September, October and November. Larger storms toward the latter half of the season were beneficial, though, bumping up November precipitation totals to 130% of normal at Natural Resources Conservation Service soil climate sites scattered across the state.

Statewide soil moisture levels ended the month at about 33% saturation, but it remains in the 30th percentile for the end of the season, Jordan Clayton, a hydrologist for the agency, wrote in a report last week. Soil moisture is considered a key factor in snowpack runoff efficiency every spring, which accounts for about 95% of the state’s water supply.

Utah’s snowpack — a collection of water in the snow — ended the month slightly above the median average for the end of November, but it had since fallen back down to 81% for this point in the season, as of Thursday.

“(It’s) really one of the slower starts we’ve seen in some number of years,” added Glen Merrill, a hydrologist for the National Weather Service, in an interview with KSL-TV this week.

What about the rest of winter?

Current long-range outlooks don’t look promising for Utahns dreaming of a white Christmas. The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center released two-week outlooks up to Dec. 25, which list Utah as having a higher probability of above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation leading up to the holiday.

Beyond that is anyone’s guess. Johnson said the ongoing trends to close out 2024 can easily continue into 2025, but Merrill said trends in the first half of the snow collection season don’t always carry over. Last winter’s snowpack, for example, reached the halfway point of the season at 69% of the median average, but a second-half moisture surge created another above-normal collection.

“It can actually change on a dime,” he said. “Just because we start slow doesn’t mean that we’re going to stay slow throughout the remainder of the winter.”

Long-range outlooks for the full season don’t offer many indications as to whether Utah is in for a dry or wet winter.

The good news in either scenario is that Utah’s reservoirs are in a good spot for at least 2025. Per the Utah Division of Water Resources, the state’s reservoir system remains about 75% full, about the same as last year and 20 percentage points ahead of the median average for December.

Contributing: Andrew Adams

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.





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