Snow during September along Colorado’s northern Front Range hasn’t been that unusual if you go back a century or more, nor is it unusual to have wide temperature swings.
But the temperature swing of coming days is predicted to be notable for its extremes. And the snow will be on the early side, too.
In the Denver area, the high temperature over the Labor Day Weekend is forecast to be 98°. By Tuesday, it will be snowing and with a low of 30° or maybe less.
Bye-bye bean harvest.
Matt Kelsch, a hydrometeorologist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, says September snow is not that uncommon in the Denver-Boulder area.
“If you look at records for the 20th century about once every four years there’s measurable snow in September, sometimes a big one. It’s not that unusual,” he says. In the last 20 years, though, that has happened only once.
Even in the 20th century, though, September snows were likely to be later in the month. Snow on Sept. 8 shows up only once in the record.
Temperature extremes have also occurred before. “In 1993, we had a high of 90 on the afternoon 12th and the morning of the 13th we had an inch of snow and 33° at 7 a.m.,” he said.
If next week’s predicted temperature plunge will not be faster, it will be more extreme: from the high 90s to freezing along the Front Range.
The swings west of the Continental Divide may be less, because the air cold mass will be moving down across the Great Plains. That being said, the Weather Channel predicts a high of 93° F in the next few days at Craig followed by a low of 19°. Granby will see a high of 82° over the weekend followed by a low of 17° on Tuesday. At Vail, the swing is from 80° to 24°.
“There’s a very real chance that we set or tie record highs on Sunday or Monday and then set or tie a record low on Wednesday. Hang on for the ride!” says the National Weather Service office at Grand Junction on its website.
Southeastern Colorado expects to be a on a roller coaster, too. Lamar is predicted to hit 105° on Sunday and 33° on Tuesday.
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Is this greater extreme a reflection of the warming and changing climate?
Yes and no, Kelsch says. He reminds his interlocutor of the distinction between weather and climate, the latter being the long-term weather patterns. Or, as is often said, climate is what you expect and weather is what you get.
In the long term and big picture, more record highs have been accumulating than record lows. “This is a good example of how we’re seeing more of the extremes, sometimes in proximity to each other.”
What clearly stands out in an inspection of the records for the last 30 years in Boulder, where Kelsch maintains a weather observation station, is a shifted pattern in precipitation. July and August have become drier, but February, March and April have become wetter.
This year fit in with that pattern. It also fits in with trends around the world. Climate change theory forecasts longer, more intense droughts but, in places, greater spurts of precipitation.
This shift along the foot of the Front Range sets up a greater risk of wildfire. The increased late winter—and spring precipitation results in growth of more grasses, which in turn is followed by higher, drier summer.
The hot temperatures this weekend will heighten the fire risk. “The only good news is that if a fire does start, it won’t have long to live,” Kelsch observes.
From Tevas to SmartWool, air conditioners to furnaces, it’s going to be a big pivot.
Parents help students move out of Bragaw Hall at North Carolina State University on Aug. 27, 2020 in Raleigh, N.C., after COVID cases continued to rise on campus. Gerry Broome/AP Photo
So, it’s not surprising to us, researchers who study diseases that can be prevented by vaccines, that with schools and colleges reopening, the virus is spreading.
These are places designed around the idea of bringing lots of people to one place. Many of them bring people together from all over the world. They are perfect places for disease to spread.
A student arrives with his parents at the University of Alabama on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020, in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Vasha Hunt/AP Photo
How we got here
Back in March, colleges and universities closed down like everything else except essential businesses. They sent students home. There was a rough transition to online instruction. Students weren’t happy, faculty weren’t happy. And so, they started to come up with plans on how to reopen for in-person instruction for the fall semester.
Many places installed plexi-glass barriers in classrooms, considered mask mandates and worked out physical distancing in lecture halls. Most people realized that professors who taught large classes should plan for remote learning.
University administrators and public health experts started making these plans in the spring. Back then, we scientists and public health researchers all operated under the assumption that community spread would be under some sort of control by fall. We all thought that the country would increase testing capacity, and we have. Then, once new cases dropped to a low level, we could institute contact tracing, the way other countries had.
It seems that for many of these institutions, the priority was on financial concerns, which involved a return to a normal fall semester to the greatest extent possible. They then developed plans that they thought would make this possible. Faculty at manyinstitutions and at least one ethics committee have argued that the priority should have been the safety of students, faculty and the surrounding communities.
While schools across the country have different priorities, enrollments, campus size, and student demographics, many schools share one thing in common: making no real contingency plans around reopening amid COVID-19, other than going remote if governors mandated it.
The schools that did spend the summer figuring out how to deliver high quality education remotely, or how to safely provide housing and access to services for the most vulnerable students, are less likely to have their fall semester disrupted. However, the College Crisis Initiative’s data dashboard found that only 7% of 1,442 four-year schools surveyed were planning on a fully online fall semester.
A pedestrian walks past a sign on campus at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
The challenge ahead
And so, the inevitable has come to pass. Now, many college campuses will struggle to control their outbreaks, because there are a lot of unique challenges inherent to COVID-19 in this population.
Colleges are not nursing homes or prisons. Some are trying to limit contact with the broader community.
But in general, students are not kept under lock and key. They have visitors from other schools. They go back and forth to their parents’ homes. And, yes, they go to parties. To us, blaming students for wanting a normal-ish college experience when the schools themselves have set the tone for trying hard to return to normal isn’t fair.
It’s also true that not all of the contact students have is as irresponsible as some have suggested. Many students hold jobs in the communities that surround the school. And most of these jobs aren’t typically the work-from-home type of job. In our undergraduate careers we both worked at jobs that had high contact rates with the community. And often, when your job is waiting tables at a local pizza place or manning a library desk, most of your colleagues are students as well. All of these factors will make contact tracing very hard.
Public health experts also expect a relatively high proportion of college-aged students to be either completely asymptomatic or to only have very mild symptoms. Without universal testing, these students won’t know they’re sick. They may not isolate if they have mild symptoms. But they will still be able to spread the virus to others. Symptom and temperature screenings may not recognize these individuals as those who need to stay away from campus buildings.
Let’s look at our university as an example. The University of Michigan has an undergraduate population of 30,000 students. Let’s assume that two-thirds of them came back to campus. That means 40,000 tests per week just for University of Michigan undergraduate students. Right now the entire state of Michigan is doing a little more than 200,000 diagnostic tests per week. Someschools have developed their own tests to handle this huge increase in capacity. But many university labs are involved in testing for large health systems and the rest of the state too. In these places it becomes very difficult for 1 in 5 tests available in an entire state to be dedicated to the students at a single university.
A scale-up of rapid, at-home antigen tests could be one approach to make testing on this scale feasible. These types of tests have the advantage of detecting highly infectious individuals – making them a good screening tool – but many are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration because they aren’t as sensitive as the standard PCR-based diagnostic test.
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If transmission on campus continues to happen mostly outside of the classroom, simply going remote will not solve the problem. Keeping students on campus will be risky. Many students will be attempting to navigate social distancing guidelines without a traditional social support network.
As much as possible, we believe students need to be able to safely return to their homes. But this can’t be done haphazardly. Bringing them to campus was a predictable risk – so is sending them home. As colleges inevitably move back to online instruction, plans must be put in place to minimize the risk of seeding epidemics. Dismissing all students, some of whom are infectious, back to their home communities risks spreading the virus further across the country, a bad outcome for all.
The unique epidemiology of COVID-19 in young adults, along with the contact patterns on college campuses and the inability to effectively screen through symptom reports or diagnostic testing, have left college campuses with few options for safely operating with in-person classes. We know that few wanted an all-remote fall semester, but it’s becoming clear that was probably our best bet.
