What are the optimal temperatures in Utah to minimize flooding?
Apr 24, 2023, 2:00 PM | Updated: 3:12 pm
FILE: Flooding on 1700 South is pictured in Salt Lake City on April 12, 2023. (Salt Lake City Police Department)
(Salt Lake City Police Department)
SALT LAKE CITY — To minimize flooding, the experts say the weather needs to switch between hot and cold. But, has the most recent cold spell lasted too long?
Every day that passes the closer we get to consistently hot weather said KSL Meteorologist Matt Johnson. He also said that’s exactly what Utah doesn’t need right now.
“We don’t want a long-standing consecutive stretch of upper-70s and mid-80s, you get five days in a row of 80s and you’re in trouble,” said Johnson.
Further, Johnson said even with Utah’s warm-ups so far, we’ve mostly only been clipping the low 70s. He said the state needs to be pushing the low 80s in order to start melting snow out of the upper elevations, where most of the snow is.
While there is still a good chance that all this water comes down smoothly, a lot of it remains in the mountains.
“We still have 90% of the snowpack to melt,” said Johnson.
His message is this: we can still minimize flooding. But every day that passes, the chance for consistently hot temperatures, as was the case in Utah in 1983, becomes greater.
Related reading:
- Dickson: “I surfed State Street” and other memories of the 1983 floods
- Utah Geological Survey monitoring 100 landslide locations across the state
