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SALT LAKE CITY — July 2017 is one for the record books, according to the National Weather Services.
"It's the warmest July ever if you go by average," said National Weather Services meteorologist Darren Van Cleave. Salt Lake City's average mean temperature was 85.3 degrees. That is more that six degrees warmer than Salt Lake's normal average mean of 78.6.
The furnace-like first was fueled by a flurry of triple-digit days on the thermometer.
KSL-TV meteorologist Grant Weyman said while the city normally only experiences six days over 100 degrees during a summer, it has posted 11 such days thus far — nine of them in July.
Weyman said this is because the heat that normally plagues Arizona moved further north, raising Utah's temperatures.
“In a normal summer it might be normally a little more to the south over Arizona, and they’ll get their typical hot weather," Weyman said. "This time it was just a little more north and so it just kind of gave us a few more hot days.”
The hottest day for the capital city this year occurred on July 5, when temperatures reached 105 degrees, breaking the previous 104-degree record set in 1973, according to the National Weather Services.
Weyman added that the odds of hitting 100 drop in August in Salt Lake City.
This month will likely go down as the hottest July ever recorded for SLC. With one day left (today) we're a full degree above 2013 #utwxpic.twitter.com/Ody7WxjFIW
— NWS Salt Lake City (@NWSSaltLakeCity) July 31, 2017
"I think most people are thankful for that because it’s been kind of hot,” he said.
Although Salt Lake City has seen the hottest month in its history, it wasn't the driest, as evidenced by several days of scattered thunderstorms last week that caused flooding in some parts of the valley. Sugar House received 2 inches of rain — and flooded dozens of homes and several schools — while the Salt Lake City International Airport received less than an inch, he said.
“In this case it’s very isolated where one area just gets dumped and the other area does not," Weyman said. "Unlike in the fall and winter when the storms are usually like these big widespread storms where everybody gets something.”
