Click the link to read the article on the KUER website (David Condos). Here’s an excerpt:
January 7, 2026
For the second straight time, Salt Lake City set a new record for its warmest year. That’s according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data that goes back to 1875. The city’s average temperature across 2025 was 57.7 degrees. That’s a full three degrees warmer than its historical average from the previous three decades. And it’s the culmination of several years of increasing warmth in Salt Lake City that has begun to top the record book.
“It looks like the past several years were in the top 15 or so,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Julie Cunningham said. “Kind of crazy to see that trend.”
Provo, Kanab, Bountiful and Boulder also set records for their warmest year in 2025. Several others, including Cedar City, St. George, Spanish Fork and Logan, saw temperatures that landed in their top 10…The summer of 2025 may not have had as many headline-grabbing heat waves as 2024 or 2023, Cunningham said, but it was consistently toastier than usual across the year as a whole. The fall was Utah’s warmest on record. The week of Christmas, cities from Kanab to Tooele broke daily records. On Dec. 22, the overnight low temperature in Salt Lake City was so warm, Cunningham said, it even surpassed that date’s record for a daytime high…Scientists say the record-breaking temperature events are another example of how global climate change — driven by fossil fuel emissions — is affecting life in places like Utah. That’s especially evident with the state’s precious water, said the University of Utah’s Paul Brooks.
“It’s really a dual threat,” the professor of hydrology and water management said. “One is just reducing the amount of water we have, and two is changing its timing, so it’s not as predictable as it once was.”
Higher temperatures fuel more evaporation. When temperatures increase across the year, it lengthens the season when evaporation occurs — essentially extending summer into parts of spring and fall. Warming also messes with the foundation of Utah’s water supply: snow. Snowpack provides 95% of the water used by Utahns. And Brooks said the state’s water management system is based on a predictable cycle of water becoming available when snow melts and flows downstream in the spring and early summer — just as demand for water starts to go up.
