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Show Bountiful sets record All-time weather marks topple for water-year ( By GARY R. BLODGETT - Editor "Rain, rain go away, come again another day." This echoes the sentiments of nearly all Davis County residents who wish that someone some-one would "turn off the faucet." If you think it's been raining steadily for the past month for the past several months, in fact - then join the crowd, because it has. It's been not only wet, but cold and the weather forecast for the next several months is for more of the same. It seems that the four-year four-year wet cycle we are in is not going to stop. William Alder, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service Office in Salt Lake City, says it all started in late September of 1982 - and hasn't let up since. The "kickoff to this 4-year weather cycle began with a tremendous 100-year storm that dumped nearly four inches of rain in Salt Lake City in 12 hours, causing widespread flooding of the Jordan River and major creeks in the Salt Lake Valley. "Since then, it has rained and snowed much above average establishing one dismal record after another," he noted. "The wet cycle has never ended." In Bountiful, it was the wettest water-year on record with 42.26 inches of precipitation between Oct. 1, 1985, and Sept. 30, 1986. Farmington weather station recorded just less than 40 inches, also an all-time precipitation high. It was cold and wet during September, wrap ping up the 1985-86 water-year with the fourth wettest September in history. In Salt Lake City, the weather station at the International Airport recorded 2.75 inches of rain during the 30-day period - 309 percent of the 0.89 average. av-erage. But it didn't come near the all-time mark for September which was 7.04 inches in 1982 most of that, you remember, came in one downpour of nearly 4 inches. The total precip for the entire water-year ending Sept. 30 at the airport recording station was 23.4 inches, or 153 percent of normal. But look at the difference between Salt Lake City and Bountiful where Bountiful recorded nearly twice that amount (42.26 inches). (Precip is recorded in both rainfall and snow pack.) In fact, there were only three months during all of 1986 that the precip records were below normal. And two of those months, January and February, have an unusual amount of precip. The other below-average month was June. The water-year average (for Salt Lake City) dating back to 1928 is 15.31 inches. But it appears that our arid climate is no more. While it is extremely wet during the past month and for the past water-year, it was also unusually cold. September was the sixth coldest col-dest September on record with an average temperature tem-perature of 60.2 degrees-making it 4.8 degrees colder than normal and only 2.7 degrees warmer war-mer than the all-time coldest September on Continued on page two Weather records topple Continued from page one . record, in 1965. Now, the question is in everyone's mind: what is this going to do to the rise of the Great Salt Lake? Because of the unusually wet summer, the lake level did not drop to the proportions that it has in past years and already is on the rise again. The lake reached its 1986 peak on June 6, an elevation of 4,21 1.85 feet above sea level. The lake level then began to decline until it measured mea-sured 4,210.70 feet on Sept. 15. But it began to climb slightly at that point and is on a steady increase, depending on the weather, according to Mr. Alder. The month of September really has climato- logists puzzled. "It's usually the driest month of the year in many parts of the state, yet reached between 250 and 450 percent of normal precip along the Wasatch Front," he said. While it was the wettest month ever in Farm-ington, Farm-ington, 5.03 inches, it was the third wettest month on record for several other reporting stations in northern Utah. The Farmington mark compares to the monthly average of 1.11 inches. However, twice the monthly average fell during a single weekend storm that recorded 2.35 inches in Bountiful; 2.11 inches in Centerville; Center-ville; 2.15 inches in Farmington; and 1.92 inches in-ches in Layton. And to top it off, there were only seven clear days in September; 13 days of partly cloudy skies; and 10 days of cloudy skies. |