This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Freezing rain, light snow and particulate-laden haze are forecast through the midweek for the Wasatch Front. That's great weather for Canada geese, or perhaps Henrik Ibsen.
The melancholy, 19th century Norwegian playwright, so painfully fond of writing about dismal days on the fjords, might find the icy rain and snow coming to the Salt Lake and Tooele valleys inspiring. It is what you might expect from a guy who wrote that, "One's life is a heavy price to pay for being born."
The pollution-trapping winter inversion, too, is hanging on along the Wasatch Front's urban valleys. The Utah Division of Air Quality issued a mandatory no-burn order that applied both to coal and wood stoves and furnaces as well as outdoor fires of all kinds in Salt Lake and Utah counties.
As of Monday, both counties were rated as "orange," or unhealthy for sensitive groups — the elderly, young children and those with compromised lung or cardiac function. The remainder of the state — with the exception of "green," or healthy Washington and Carbon counties — earned "yellow," or moderate grades for particulate levels.
Ah, but Ibsen also wrote that, "To live is to war with trolls in the heart and soul." So, do the former, dodge the latter and take comfort: the National Weather Service says Monday's cold rain will morph into light snowfall in northern Utah as temperatures climb from the predawn 20s to highs around 30 degrees on Tuesday.
Southern Utahns, meanwhile, shrugged into their winter coats as chilly rain showers — and in the mountains a dusting of snow — opened the first full week of 2016. High temperatures were to be in the mid- to upper-40s, with overnight lows a degree or two above freezing.
The Utah Avalanche Center rated the risk for potentially deadly backcountry snowslides at "considerable" for the mountains above Ogden, Salt Lake and Provo, as well as the Unitas as of Monday; the Logan, Skyline, Moab and Abajo districts earned "moderate" avalanche risk grades.
For more extensive forecast information, visit The Salt Lake Tribune's weather page at: http//www.sltrib.com/weather.
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