I've been tracking this upcoming storm for the past week or so and it's been nice to have a legit winter-like storm to track.  We've already had a few snow events this month, but this upcoming storm should be the most significant yet.  

There is an initial frontal boundary that is trying to sag into far northern Utah today, but that is going to stall out to our north. A reinforcing wave will then push the boundary into Northern Utah and the Wasatch front on Saturday morning.  This is going to spread rain across northern Utah, with the heaviest precip from the Cottonwoods/PC north to the Idaho border. You can see total precip expected thru early next week on this map:

Earlier this week, models had cold air arriving a bit earlier.  Now, however, the cold air is not expected to arrive until early Sunday.  This means that Saturday should be rain all the way up to at least 10,000 feet.  

On Sunday, a second wave of precip pushes in, this time with MUCH COLDER air.  Snow levels will crash all the way down below 6000 feet.  There is even a chance for snow on the benches on Sunday morning.  Sunday is when we could see up to 6" of snow fall in the high elevations.  Some of the very highest elevations of the Wasatch and Uintas could be snow for longer and therefore see much higher accumulations.  You can see these areas well in the below snowfall map.  

So the heavy snow will be very localized to the highest peaks, but a few inches of snow will be possible for all mountains above 7000 feet from the Cottonwoods northward. 

We should then start to clear out late Sunday evening into Monday.  A trailing disturbance could bring a chance for light snow showers thru Tuesday, before we clear out for good midweek.  

This may be one of the few times I'm happy that models have backed off a bit on a really cold, significant storm.  I like small storms this kind of year -- the type that make for nice scenery but quickly melt.  A large storm now has the potential to stick around on northerly aspects and cause snow stability issues down the road.  Right now it looks like that won't be too much of an issue.  

 

Really no strong signals for either ridging or troughing after the first week of October. I would expect seasonable weather to continue.  Here are the GFS forecasted temps for SLC for the next week 10 days.  I added a red line to indicate the average high temp for this time of year.  You can see that after today, we should stay below average. 

There is a chance that SLC has seen its last 80F day of the year.  Technically, we've gotten to 80F as late as October 26th, so no promises, but it is possible if we avoid a strong ridge.  For me, the ideal scenario is that after this weekend, we have a relatively cool, but dry period thru mid-October.  Then, in late October, the hose turns on and it starts snowing and doesn't stop until May.  I can dream...

Evan | OpenSnow