Congratulations! We all just lived through the warmest winter on record in Utah.
Meteorological winter is defined as December through February, constituting the three coldest months climatologically in the northern hemisphere.
Salt Lake City International Airport had an average temperature for these three months of 40.7°F. For context, that is 7.6° warmer than normal. It also broke the previous record for warmest winter by an astounding 2.2°. To break a seasonal record by that kind of margin is truly remarkable.
I recently spent an afternoon digging into both precipitation and snowfall data across the state for the water year thus far. The beginning of the “water year” is Oct. 1. Since Oct. 1, 2025, most of Utah, you may be surprised to learn, is actually around normal in terms of total precipitation. These SNOTEL automated sensors are mostly around normal across the Wasatch and Uintas.
If you were to show me this without context, I would have assumed that Utah was having a normal snow year because I would have assumed normal temperatures. However, given that we have been having a record-shatteringly warm winter, these numbers have not translated to anything close to a normal snowpack.
As we have discussed repeatedly in this column, our statewide snowpack has been trending near 60% of average for much of the season. Park City isn’t faring much better with the current upper elevation snowpack near 70%, but much of the lower mountain is showing bare dirt.
The good news is that this week is bringing a reprieve from warm storms. We have already seen one storm this week, which started with higher snow levels on Sunday and Monday but trended cooler by Tuesday. The upper elevations of Park City picked up 8 inches of new snow, with lesser amounts down toward Deer Valley.
Another, even colder, storm is approaching Utah. It will arrive by Thursday morning and bring snow to all elevations through the day Thursday into Thursday night, perhaps lingering into early Friday.
The cold air associated with this storm will allow for higher snow-to-liquid ratios. This is a measure of how light or dense the snow is. Our current forecast shows these ratios around 15:1 for the duration of the storm. This means for every inch of precipitation that falls, we receive 15 inches of snow.
This would qualify as “fluffy,” and more typical of Utah’s “Greatest Snow on Earth.”
As for amounts, over a foot of snow will be possible in the Cottonwood Canyons, with amounts in the range of 6-12” for Park City and Deer Valley.
We can see this same map in 3D in order to visualize how the higher amounts are likely in the upper elevations.
At Park City, the models show an average of roughly 9” of snow for the storm at mid-mountain.
Get after this fresh powder on Thursday and Friday while we have it! Unfortunately, it looks like high pressure is going to take control this weekend and is likely to continue into next week. I would say we will have spring skiing conditions next week, but I’m fairly certain we’ve had spring skiing conditions all winter.