This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated.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.
If only breathing were optional, residents of Utah's inversion-plagued urban valleys just might put their lungs on hiatus this week.
The lack of new, atmosphere-freshening storms had smog and particulate levels on the rise Monday, a trend that will only worsen in the days ahead. The Utah Division of Air Quality urged Utahns to choose mass transit for their commute, banned outdoor burning entirely, along with use of solid fuel burning stoves and furnaces in the densely populated Cache-Weber-Davis-Salt Lake-Utah County corridor.
Health officials advised the elderly, young children, and those with cardiopulmonary and immune deficiency issues to avoid prolonged outdoor activity.
Also, might be a good idea for you and your yogi to stay inside to practice Pranayama, particularly that whole "breath retention" routine, unless you want your "Lion Pose" to look less like the powerful, channeling of a big cat and more like a 25-year-old, feral feline hacking up a fur ball. Your choice.
What's not a choice is Tuesday's forecast in the Salt Lake and Tooele valleys: morning fog and later in the day the aforementioned haze, even under tinged, if sunny skies. High temperatures were pegged around 40 degrees with overnight lows in the low-20 — same as forecast on Monday.
The National Weather Service blamed the pollution-trapping inversions on a strong high-pressure system that had settled over the Great Basin in general, and Utah's major metropolitan areas specifically. Along with the daytime smog, the region also will experience areas of dense night and morning fog extending past the midweek.
Temperatures were balmier, and breathing easier in southern Utah. Utah's Dixie and the Zion National Park region expected highs in the low- to mid-60s in Tuesday, and lows in the low-30s — also a repeat of Monday's forecast.
The Utah Avalanche Center rated the risk for potentially deadly backcountry snowslides at "moderate" for all of the state's mountain slopes, except for the Moab and Abajo districts, which were at "considerable" as of Monday.
For more extensive forecast information, visit The Salt Lake Tribune's weather page at: http//www.sltrib.com/weather.
Twitter: @remims