If Salt Lake City’s unseasonably warm temperatures are interrupting your hopes of a white holiday season, you might need to adjust your expectations.
Salt Lake City on Thursday saw a heat record for the date, and the National Weather Service isn’t expecting temperatures to drop soon.
According to the weather service’s Salt Lake City office, Thursday’s high of 62 degrees tied with Dec. 11, 1993, as the hottest Dec. 11 on record in Salt Lake City.
“It’s pretty unseasonably warm,” Julie Cunningham, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said Friday. “In fact, we’re wearing our Hawaiian shirts here at work today because it’s so warm.”
The unseasonable heat is due to a high pressure system that’s been sitting to the west for about a week and, slowly moving over Utah, bringing with it a warm air mass, Cunningham said.
The balmy temperatures aren’t expected to cool down in the next week, she added. The National Weather Service’s seven-day forecast predicts that Salt Lake City will reach the 50s every day through at least next Thursday.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Kids enjoy the warm afternoon weather as they fish at Farmington Pond, on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025.
“I think those warm temperatures might stick around,” Cunningham said. “We’re strongly favored towards above-normal temperatures in both the six-to-10 day outlook, and the eight-to-14 day outlook.”
The unusual heat, she added, isn’t helping Utah’s snowpack.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, only 10% of recorded years saw a smaller snowpack than what has accumulated for this time of year around the state.