A warm, occasionally wet weekend is coming for the Wasatch Front, and storm clouds will combine with near triple-digit temperatures to make southern Utah both hot and humid.
Perhaps only Shakira would enthusiastically welcome such prospects. “I’m like a mosquito,” the Colombian singer and dancer once said. “I love humidity. I don’t sweat.”
Well, the rest of us do. Welcome to mid-August in perspiring Utah, with its monsoonal visitation. Specifically, the National Weather Service blames an upper-atmospheric ridge of moist air, slowly rotating over northern and central and southern Utah over the next several days.
Saturday in the Salt Lake and Tooele valleys will dawn partly cloudy before reaching the upper-90s in the afternoon, up a few degrees from Friday. Both days were forecast to have periods of isolated thunderclaps and rain, with precipitation decreasing throughout Sunday, with highs in the upper-80s.
The lower third of the state looked for temperatures around 100 on Friday to retreat only a degree or two Saturday and Sunday. Thunderstorms and showers will punctuate the weekend for steamy Utah’s Dixie.
Even with the potential for rain storms throughout the state, compromised air quality was expected to persist, at least for the next couple days. The Utah Division of Air Quality graded the entire state as “yellow,” or at moderate levels for ozone and particulate pollution.
Mold and chenopods rose to “high” levels on the Intermountain Allergy & Asthma website’s pollen index as of Friday, but other allergens were at “low,” or did not register at all.
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