Wet/Cold Week Ahead, And My Coronavirus Wake-Up Call

I hate to do this, but I’m going to start off this blog on a preachy note. I think most people get the severity of the coronavirus situation by now, but to those who don’t – I also didn’t grasp the severity until this past week. I saw the death toll skyrocketing in Italy and heard the horror stories of hospitals being overflowed with critically ill patients, and I knew that something similar was inevitable in the US, but it still hadn’t quite “hit” me yet. That all changed with two events this past week: first, Steve Shulman, the owner of the Leschi Market in Seattle, passed from COVID-19, and second, I talked to a family friend/epidemiologist who was brutally honest about the severity of the pandemic.

I grew up in the Leschi neighborhood and frequently went to Leschi Market with my friends or family. Steve’s jovial face was often behind the butcher counter (Leschi Market has really good meat!) or stocking wine bottles and he and exuded joy and warmth always. He was very well-known in the community, had a huge, positive effect on the lives on some of my friends who worked at Leschi Market, and will be greatly missed by so many.

My mother (bless her soul, always supporting my passions!) sent my previous post where I explored whether COVID-19 would die off in the spring to some family friends in the medical field, and we got an interesting email discussion going about the virus. One of our friends, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Health (NIH), put the situation in pretty dire terms.

He believed that there were only two things that would stop the spread of the virus at this point of penetrance; >50% of the population becoming immune after recovery, or a vaccine, and that having a vaccine ready for public use in a year is ‘very optimistic.’ Additionally, even after the vaccine is officially ‘ready’, there are still the logistical issues of generating enough vaccine and distributing it to everybody. His best guess was that it would be two years before even a very successful vaccine could have enough of an effect to return everything to normal, and because societies simply will not be economically able to ‘shelter in place’ for two years, we will have to return to semi-normal lifestyles well before the threat of infection subsides.

The epidemiologist was still heavily in favor of “flattening the curve” to save lives, as flattening the curve gives us more time to get ventilators, PPE (personal protective equipment), respirators, hospital beds, etc. to treat the sick. Italy had horror stories of hospitals having ventilator shortages and doctors having to choose which patients live or die. I don’t know if we will see similar headlines here in the next weeks, and that is incredibly frightening.

The point of all of this is not to put you into a state of panic, though I understand that it is overwhelming! It’s also not to tell you to keep yourself locked in your apartment for the indefinite future, as you can still go outside for a walk with minimal risk if you practice social distancing, are mindful of and reduce the amount of surfaces you touch, and don’t touch your face. Rather, it’s to emphasize that our job, as collective citizens, is to do everything we can within our power to not get infected or pass an infection onto other people so that we can buy ourselves some time for supply chains to ramp up the production of necessary medical supplies. This means washing your hands thoroughly (two happy birthday choruses!) and frequently throughout the day, not touching our faces, and practicing social distancing.

The Weather

Now for a complete, 180-degree reversal to a much, much lighter topic: the weather! Phew. I went on a hike at Mt. Talbert with fellow WeatherTogether blogger Karl Bonner today and we saw some cool stuff. The “first robin of spring” (for me, anyway) popped out about 5 minutes into our walk, and about 30 seconds later, a deer paused to take a look at us no more than 30 feet off the side of the trail.

Bright sunny skies during our morning walk gave way to high clouds in the afternoon as a deep upper-level trough approached the coast. The image below, valid 5pm Sunday, shows the infrared satellite with overlaid 500mb height contours (green)-note the center of the trough near Haida Gwaii and the leading cold front spreading high clouds into the Pacific Northwest.

These high clouds will thicken and lower overnight, and we should see some light rain over the Western Washington and Oregon for the Monday morning commute/telecommute.

Showers will intensify Monday afternoon as the high sun angles warm the surface and further destabilize the already unstable post-frontal airmass. Tuesday afternoon will see even heavier showers, with small hail and a few rumbles of thunder possible along the coast and potentially in the Willamette Valley, though instability will be more marginal east of the Coast Range.

From 5am Mon – 5am Wed, the high-resolution WRF model gives 0.25 – 0.75 inches of rain to the Portland metro area (less in the Coast Range rainshadow, more in SW Washington). With snow-levels near 2,000 feet, we’ll see plenty of snow for the Cascades, Coast Range, and even the highest elevations of the Willapa Hills. My guess is that the very highest elevations of the Willapa Hills (~3000′) could see up to 3-6″ of snow over this period, while Timberline could see over a foot. Too bad the ski resorts aren’t open!

Showers should decrease on Wednesday, and Thursday should actually be a dry day before a few showers return Friday and for the weekend. Temperatures this week will be cool, with highs only reaching the low 50s through Friday and the mid 50s this weekend.

Looking towards next week and beyond, the GFS model keeps us slightly wetter-than-average with temperatures moderating closer to average, which is near 60 degrees for the first week of April. In other words, a pretty typical “showers and sunbreaks” regime looks likely next week.

As an aside, this has to be the only time in my life where the weather a couple days out has actually been easier to predict than the rest of the mayhem around the world; even in the chaos of a Trump presidency we’d at least been humming along at a somewhat steady state. Nobody knows what the next weeks and months will bring, but we can be sure that we are in for a wild ride.

Stay calm and wash your hands! And if you ever are bored and feel like you need someone to talk to – guess what – me too! My number is (206) 450-6810; hit me up anytime. These are crazy times and it’s better to get through them together.

Charlie