The western half of the United States just experienced one of the most remarkable spring heatwaves — relative to normal — anybody has ever seen.
If you set foot outside at any point between Tuesday and Saturday of last week, it will come as no surprise that Park City was not spared in this anomalous warmth. If it felt more like summer than early spring to you, that’s because the temperatures we saw last week were more typical of June than March.
Perhaps the most telling graphic was from NOAA, which mapped some of the sites that saw their warmest-ever temperatures during the month of March.
In many cases, these locations had never before seen temperatures this warm in April. To see so many records shattered in such a way across a broad swath of our country was truly astonishing.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we saw the warmest meteorological winter (December-February) on record here in Utah. Now March is on track, at least in Salt Lake City, to be the warmest March on record and by quite a large margin.
What has all this heat done to our snowpack? Not good things. Park City’s Thaynes Canyon SNOTEL site has seen a noticeable drop in snow-water-equivalent (SWE) over the past week.
This site does not typically peak until the middle of April. As such, seeing a steep decline in snowpack in mid-March is concerning. Because of this drop, we have now fallen to 62% of median for the date.
On the mountain itself, the snow has been somewhat resilient up high on north-facing aspects. In those locations, you could actually find some decent spring skiing conditions over the past week, so long as you could get to it before it turned to sticky mashed potatoes later in the day. However, down low, where the snowpack was already suffering before the heatwave, the snow is all but gone.
Deer Valley and Park City, as of the time of writing, still both show closing dates in mid-April. Whether they can make it to those dates remains to be seen.
Over the next week, we are going to see very warm, possibly record, temperatures continue through the middle portion of the week. We will see modest cooling heading into the weekend. Some atmospheric moisture may work its way into Utah from the south this weekend, bringing a slight chance for afternoon showers in the high elevations.
As for any chances of hope for real, winter-like storms to return to Utah … I do have good news on that front. Forecast models have been consistently showing a more active pattern developing next week, at the very end of March and beginning of April. While it is still early for details, it looks like we should see much cooler temperatures and chances for mountain snowfall next week.
Will it be too little, too late? That remains to be seen.
For up-to-date forecasts, you can subscribe to Evan’s Utah Daily Snow forecast on OpenSnow.com and the OpenSnow app.