This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated.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.
"With my last breath, I'll exhale my love for you. I hope it's a cold day, so you can see what you meant to me," author and humorist Jarod Kintz wrote in what serves as a poetic, if quirky summation of northern Utah's weekend-ending forecast.
By Thursday morning, the first pulse of a cycle of snowstorms will scour much of the inversion-trapped pollution from the Wasatch Front's urban valleys.
And, without a particulate-laden, hacking cough to deal with — the Salt Lake Valley was under a mandatory no-burn order Wednesday due to compromised air quality — Kintz's last gasp would be both clean and, without the haze, poignantly visible in the sub-freezing air.
By Thursday night, atmospheric stirring and light to moderate snowfall will have all Utah Division of Air Quality monitoring stations on the way from "yellow," or moderately polluted status to "green," or healthy conditions.
It only gets better for fans of breathing, with more and stronger storms expected Friday and Sunday, bringing moderate snowfall to the lower elevations and more significant accumulations in the mountains.
The Salt Lake and Tooele valleys looked for highs in the low- to mid-30s on Thursday, a couple degrees cooler than forecast on Wednesday. Light snowfall was expected to greet commuters Thursday morning, and again in the afternoon. Overnight lows were predicted to dip into the low- to mid-20s.
Southern Utahns gets to skip this latest winter storm. Highs under partly cloudy skies were forecast to reach near 50 degrees on Thursday, with lows in the low-30s — same as on Wednesday.
The Utah Avalanche Center rated the risk for potentially deadly backcountry snowslides at "moderate" for all the state's backcountry mountain slopes, with the exception of the Logan and Skyline districts, which was rated "low."
For more extensive forecast information, visit The Salt Lake Tribune's weather page at: http//www.sltrib.com/weather.
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