Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Do storms in utah ever move from east to west? Moving from the Wasatch mountains towards the Oquirrh mountains? Please clear up this disagreement with my husband who thinks he is always right. hee hee hee. I told him I have never in my life here in utah seen a storm move from east to the west, and he says you guys have shown the clouds and precipitation move from east to west, and that it is very rare. I said storms do move from the southwest to the northeast or from the northwest to the southeast.
Kristen B
**********************************************************
We seem to be settling a lot of bets here in this section of the web. I hate to tell you that you are going to lose on this one, but do know that east to west storms do not happen as often.
Storms can move from east to west but what is your definition of storm? If we're talking about one lonely t-storm cell moving from somewhere like Big Cottonwood over then across the valley and then to the Oquirrhs, well it's not as likely but it could happen and you can't rule it out. If your definition of storm is just a batch of rain, then sure, that can move from east to west or south to north or wherever really based on where the parent area of low pressure is.
Also fronts can move backwards too. Typically a cold front will move from the northwest to the southeast but we can have fronts that come from the northeast and drop to the southwest these are called "back door" cold fronts and don't happen that much either.
Big batches of rain often times move around an area of low pressure, depending on where the low is, the flow around it will steer where the rain goes. Remember, lows move counter clockwise. If we have a big upper level low sitting around south central Utah then the rain can be kicked up and around the low so in northern Utah we might get rain moving from southeast to northwest.
A lot of our stronger type of thunderstorms are associated with fronts which also typically are coming in from the west so the storms are moving from west to east. But you can still have storms moving the other way.
Answered by KSL Meteorologist Dina Freedman.
