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I would like to be able to compare these two cities, how many days above 100 degrees a year and 90 degrees. How much average snowfall and snow days. Mean temperatures for different seasons, etc.
Is there somewhere I can go to that would have this information? Thanks for your time,
Monica
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A hefty request Monica, let's see what we can do and send you on your way. We continue to get requests in for climate information, this seems to be our viewers #1 weather question, and it's been like that at every station I've ever worked at. Everyone wants to know a little about this, a little about that, how much snow we get or how warm the summer is but doesn't know where to find that information.
We talked about this before, the data you are looking for is listed as CLIMATE, not as just 'weather' so a lot of times, people have a very hard time finding this information on the web.
Let's start at the National Weather Service Climate Page for Salt Lake. By using the link located on the right, you are brought to a mecca of climate info if you know to use it. In the section called "Local Data and Records" there's a link for "Salt Lake City Climate" which takes you a wonderful page of a load of info. Since you are looking for snow, you can click on the snow flake and there are multiple tables, but one of them has mean snowfall in the description, so that's the one you are looking for.
In our "Ask the Meteorologist" section of the page a few weeks ago, (http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=367&sid=177220) we learned that by using the monthly summary, we hit 100 degrees in Salt Lake an average of 5 times a summer.
Also by using the Climate page with the link on the right, you can look at archived summaries of weather from the summer. The September 2005 summary lists an average summer in Salt Lake yields 56 days with highs of 90 or above. This would be the closest data point to Centerville with this much information available.
For Cedar City, we have to go the Western Regional Climate Center, there's a link on the right. You can hit Utah, then find Cedar City FAA Airport on the big list of Utah cities. Here we find using the Tabular data from 1971-2000 that Cedar City averages 24 days at 90 per year statistically, but there are a few more days around 89.9 as well.
Some of the snow data is missing from the tables, but it appears that the average is around 45 inches of snow per year for the airport. Many people in Cedar City live higher up than the airport, the snow average there per year is more likely around 60 inches to give you an educated guess.
Happy climate hunting.
Answered by KSL Meteorologist Dina Freedman
