This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Northern Utah's not done with record-setting February warmth. Only the calendar insists it's still winter.
The 68-degree high temperature recorded Friday by the National Weather Service's Salt Lake City office marked the warmest Feb. 6 ever registered for the state's capital. The old mark, 63, had been in place since 1934.
And the 65-degree high recorded Thursday broke the previous record of 62, which had been in place since 1963.
Saturday's high was forecast to hit 60, still some 20 degrees higher than normal for the date, but 3 degrees cooler than the 63-degree record set in 1886.
Provo, Tooele, Alpine and Laketown also set records on Thursday, marking highs of 70 (old record 58, in 2001), 68 (66, in 1963), 67 (58, in 1995), and 58 (55, in 1963), respectively.
In general, the northern Wasatch Front will look for morning rain showers and highs in the upper-50s on Saturday, a 5-7 degree dip from Friday's balmy forecast. For southern Utah, 10-20 mph winds are the only blemish on a springlike Saturday, when the mercury will climb into the mid-60s to near 70 under partly cloudy skies.
It only gets better when you take that tentative deep breath, anticipating the weekend. The Utah Division of Air Quality is flying its "green," or healthy air quality pennants statewide.
However, if you venture on ski, snowboard, snowshoe or snowmobile into the state's mountain backcountry this weekend, extra care was urged by the Utah Avalanche Center. Due to daytime heating, forecasters rated the risk of potentially deadly snowslides in the mountains above Logan as "considerable," while grading risks at "moderate" for the Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo and Uintas districts. Only the mountains above Moab earned "low" avalanche risk assessment as of Friday.
For more extensive forecast information visit the Tribune's weather page at http://www.sltrib.com/weather.
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