Hot weather theory

Post Reply New Topic

If you swim in water that is cooler than your body (in my climate it always is), the water takes heat from your body at contact. It's very efficient.
Outside the water, humans sweat and evaporating sweat is supposed to take the excess heat away. In humid air, the sweat does not vaporize so sweating does not help much.

Thanx for replying cuz this makes sense

the worst thing about humidity in heat is it renders the body's sweating mechanism futile, the sticky greasy oily stinky sweat can't evaporate, it just hangs like a filmy warm coating on the body.

Ever since I was a tot I have heard elders say "it's not the heat it's the humidity".

Its kinda common knowledge that humidity makes both extremes in temperature feel worse: hot feel hotter, and cold feel colder.

Ofcourse- now that I think about it- all of those elders were relatives from out west (deserts of New Mexico, and the prairies of Kansas and Colorado) who were visiting us here in the more humid Washington D.C.. So they all were keenly aware of the difference humidity made.

The high plains.

In the summer, the humidity at night can be up into the 40s, but in the middle of the day it can be well below 20.

Here's a well known chart about the effectiveness of a swamp cooler (evaporative cooler) at various humidities and temperatures.

I live in a humid, hot, wet swamp. I like it. I'm happy here.

Humidity keeps your skin from drying out.In the winter the wood heat sucks the moisture out of the room,even keeping a kettle on doesn’t help.
Whenever I’ve visited a dry place I have to slather on chapstick and lotion or I dry out.
The only thing I really dislike about it is mold grows really fast.My wood ceiling got a coating of blue aspergillosis mold, (not sure if I spelled that right).I had to Lysol the whole ceiling and run the ac to kill it.
Supposedly violent crimes go up the hotter it gets.

I'm out. Take care everyone!

eliza doolittle shoulda sung "the rain in spain falls mainly in the mountains, the plains are hot and dry."

I can't stand hot weather, and high humidity makes it even worse.

High humidity also makes cold worse.

Let’s not forget how cars make hot weather worse. When you’re outside enjoying the sun, “too hot” starts at 90 degrees. When you’re in a car, it starts at 75. The last place I want to be on a summer day is a car.

unless that car has effective a/c

That's true of the climate in Washington state.

Not sure if that's true of Spain. Here is an interesting musical tidbit: a Spanish band doing a spoof of Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". The song is "Sweet Home Galicia". And the hook is "where the skies are so gray" (instead of blue as in the American original).

Galicia is the coastal province in the northeast of Spain (just above Portugal). Galicia has low mountians, but not major mountains. So maybe ..the rain in Spain DOES fall... mainly in the plain!

areas close to the water in the northern hemisphere at least, will tend to have more precip in general, esp. in proximity to nearby mountains, from what i've read. but the rains in spain do tend to be more abundant in the mountains.

maybe. I was kinda joking with the music video.

The winds in the temperate zone are westerly. So if you live on the west coast of a continent you tend to get lots of rain. You do and so do the folks in Ireland. But Ireland and western Europe don't have a range of big mountains that parallel the coast line the way that the Rockie run along the coast of Oregan, Washington, and British Columbia . The Rockies stop the rain and force it to be dumped right there on the North west coast of north America. In western Europe the rainy zone extends hundreds of miles into the continent of Europe and just gradually peters out.

I have lived in hot climates with dry heat. I can tolerate 100 degrees F in the shade in these environments. It helps if there is a breeze.

But hot and humid is definitely worse. 90 degrees with high humidity is difficult.

The physics theory behind this is because of "evaporative cooling".

Evaporative cooling is a reduction in temperature resulting from the evaporation of a liquid, which removes latent heat from the surface from which evaporation takes place. This process is employed in industrial and domestic cooling systems, and is also the physical basis of sweating.

In dry heat, my sensitivity to heat is dramatically reduced. I have been in 130 degree temperatures in Death Valley in one of the hottest days. It is hard for me to distinguish between 100 and 130. That is why very high temperatures are so dangerous.