Continuing hot, dry weather and the prospect for gusty winds and dry lightning storms prompted the National Weather Service to put much of northern and western Utah under a Red Flag wildfire danger warning Wednesday.
The advisory, which encompasses the Salt Lake and west-central deserts and Wasatch Mountains, ran from noon to midnight.
Those tinder-dry conditions may ease some come Thursday, when rain is expected to accompany thunderstorms in the Salt Lake and Tooele valleys and beyond. Thursday’s temperatures will be in the upper-80s, down 7-10 degrees from Wednesday’s forecast.
Friday will see highs in the low-90s along the Wasatch Front under clear, sunny skies.
Windy thunderstorms and some isolated showers also were on tap for southern Utah Thursday, but highs still will approach triple-digits, as they were forecast to do on Wednesday. Utah’s Dixie looked for highs around 103 degrees under partly cloudy skies on Friday.
The Utah Division of Air Quality gave yellow grades to Salt Lake, Davis, Weber, Tooele, Box Elder and Utah counties, indicating ”moderate” levels of ozone and particulate pollution through Friday. The rest of the state was green,” having what was deemed healthy air quality.
The Intermountain Allergy & Asthma website ranked chenopods as “very high,” mold “high” and ragweed “moderate” on its pollen index as of Wednesday. Other allergens were ’low” or did not register.