On the final day of meteorological winter, temperatures in Cedar City reached a balmy 68 degrees.
That may be great for sunbathing or biking. It’s less great if your business depends on a powdery winter blanket on nearby mountainsides.
“The overall feeling on the snow season has been disappointment, and especially coming off of last year,” said David Whitmore, owner of the Cedar Sports gear shop in Cedar City. “Last year was really bad, but people didn't lose hope until mid-January. But people this year lost hope in November.”
When the snow is low, it’s bad for Utah’s winter sports business, which had a $643 million economic impact in 2023, the most recent available data. The snow drought blanketing the West this year isn’t helping.
Sales at Whitmore’s shop dropped hard in November, he said, as many Utah ski resorts — including nearby Brian Head — delayed their openings. He estimates rentals for wide powder skis are down 90% this season, although customers have still sought narrower skis for groomed trails. The shop has been renting rock climbing shoes throughout the winter, which he said is unusual.
To stay afloat, Cedar Sports ramped up its marketing and community outreach, and Whitmore said they’ve been able to recover. Other snow sports businesses he’s talked with aren’t so lucky.
“Most shops are down quite a bit,” he said. “If you were to take a survey of all the shops in Utah, most of them would be having a really rough year.”
Utah’s snowpack is back in record low territory in early March, after a fleeting bump from a few days of snow in February.
Less than a month away from the typical peak of Utah’s snow season, statewide levels are just 62% of normal. It’s a similar story across the Upper Colorado River Basin, where regionwide snowpack is also at a record low.
One of the main culprits is the historic warmth that has smothered the state.
“When it's warm, it's more common that precipitation falls as rain rather than snow,” said Adrienne Marshall, a hydrologist and assistant professor with the Colorado School of Mines.
Meteorological winter runs from December through February. Salt Lake City’s average temperature across those three months was a record-setting 40.7 degrees. That’s 2.2 degrees warmer than the previous high from 2014-15 and 7.6 degrees above the city’s historical normal from 1991-2020.
A very long list of Utah cities joined Salt Lake in cracking open the record book, from St. George to Provo to Duchesne. Alta Ski Area and Dinosaur National Monument set high marks, too.
Some of the previous records had stood for decades. Cedar City, Deseret and Scipio broke records that had stood since 1978, 1934 and 1907, respectively.
It’s the latest sign of how climate change — which scientists agree is driven by human-caused emissions — is bringing local effects to Utah. The two-year period beginning in February 2024 ranks as the state’s warmest on record.
A winter like this is not completely unprecedented for the West, Marshall said, pointing to similar snow volume data from 1977, 2003 and 2024. But it may also be a glimpse into Utah’s future.
“With warming temperatures, we expect to see more years where we're looking at these really low snow conditions,” Marshall said. “It's certainly reasonable to expect warm winters with low snow to become increasingly frequent.”
Snowpack acts like a giant natural reservoir, Marshall said, holding onto water until we need it in the spring and early summer. Around 95% of Utah’s water supply comes from melting snow.
Winters with low snow tend to have an earlier runoff, she said, which can create problems for refilling vital reserves.
Federal projections expect that Lake Powell — the nation’s second-largest reservoir and a pillar of the Colorado River system — will probably reach new record low levels by the end of 2026, which could threaten Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to generate hydroelectric power. Utah’s reservoirs other than Powell and Flaming Gorge are around two-thirds full, notably behind this time last year.
The parched, warm winter could also rev up Utah’s wildfire season, Marshall said, because soil and vegetation may dry out earlier.
“We might have a longer summer dry period, and that can increase our fire risk,” Marshall said. “That is a concern I have for this summer based on the data we have about historical relationships between snow and fire.”
Worsening wildfires might not be the only reason to worry about air quality, as climate change makes winters like this more common.
The lack of snow on the ground in the Salt Lake Valley should keep winter inversion conditions from peaking, said Heather Holmes, an associate professor at the University of Utah who studies air pollution. But with fewer winter storms to clear things out, pollutants can linger for extended periods.
“The longer the build-up stays without a storm, the more it accumulates. And so the worse it gets,” Holmes said. “As long as that stagnation is there, the air quality generally just stays bad with it.”
Seeing those impacts this year is not a surprise, she said, because scientific research has long signaled that a changing climate could hurt air quality.
A Stanford University study from 2014 warned that global warming’s impact on the atmosphere will likely increase the number of days with air stagnation in the western U.S. Other research from 2009 and 2012 indicated particulate matter episodes may become more common from California to the Midwest by the 2050s as the climate shifts.
This new climate reality will impact people across the West, Marshall said, but just how destructive those impacts become at least partially depends on the actions communities and policymakers take.
One strategy to reduce the risk to an area’s water supply may be changing reservoir management. Some places in the West are trying a “forecast-informed” approach, she said, rather than automatically releasing water in anticipation of flood season.
“They'll use the weather forecast, and if there's no big storms coming, they might keep the reservoirs fuller than they would otherwise,” Marshall said. “Then if you don't get any big spring storms, you can hold on to water that you might have otherwise released.”
Other adaptations could include conserving more water in cities and farms and ramping up preventative wildfire measures, such as thinning forests to reduce potential fuels. Even though global warming may seem like a daunting foe, she said, individual communities can do things to curb climate change, too.
“The future of our snow conditions is not predetermined,” Marshall said. “Our future emissions trajectories are not set in stone, and to the extent that we can reduce emissions, that's probably going to be beneficial for our water conditions.”
