This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated.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.
For those downwind of the Great Salt Lake Thursday, it was a Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque forecast. "Ooooh that smell, can't you smell that smell?" Why yes, we could.
It wasn't the "smell of death" Ronnie Van Zant sang about, but winds out of the northwest did tweak Wasatch Front nostrils with a whiff of rotten eggs. You can blame that on the seasonal bacterial breakdown of organic matter — bird, brine fly, brine shrimp and, yes, human waste — accumulated within Utah's shallow inland sea.
Windy weather may not carry the renowned "Lake Stink" beyond the valleys of the Wasatch, but gusts topping 35 mph did warrant a Hazardous Weather Outlook advisory from the National Weather Service for the eastern third of the state. That pattern turns to rain on Friday.
The Salt Lake and Tooele valleys, meantime, looked for partly cloudy skies and high temperatures in the upper-70s on Friday, a few degrees warmer than Thursday's forecast. Scattered thunderstorms will move into those areas by Friday evening.
Southern Utahns expected daytime highs in the low-90s on Friday under partly cloud skies, up a few degrees from Thursday's predictions.
The Utah Division of Air Quality graded all monitoring stations as "green," or healthy for breathing through the midweek.
The Intermountain Allergy & Asthma website's index as of Wednesday ranked maple, ash and sycamore pollen at "very high" levels, while oak was "high" and mulberry came in at "moderate."
For more extensive forecast information, visit the Tribune's weather page at http://www.sltrib.com/weather.
Twitter: @remims