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BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: The heat continues



Wednesday, August 02, 2006  

The heat continues


I wouldn't call it schadenfreude, since I'm not cruelly-gleeful about it, but I'm definitely getting a sense of pleasure as I read the daily news stories about the horrible heatwave now hitting the US East Coast. My pleasure comes from remembering when that was me, and sighing at the refreshing 72 degree (22c) high I am now enjoying.

The article is about the rest of the US getting baked by the same heatwave we suffered through last weekend; the heat that drove us to buy an A/C unit and to consider it the best $349 we ever spent. That cursed weather lingered over the West Coast for several days, then finally moved east, baking the mountains, then the Midwest, and it's now reached the East Coast. Does any of this sound familiar from my complaining last week?
Commuters up and down the East Coast sweated on their way to work Wednesday and others stayed close to fans and swimming pools as the temperature and humidity climbed back up to heat wave levels after a night of little relief.

The National Weather Service posted heat advisories and warnings from Maine to Oklahoma. Triple-digit temperatures were forecast Wednesday along the East Coast as far north as parts of Maine and New Hampshire.

By 11 a.m., the heat index at Washington's Reagan National Airport was 103 -- a combination of the 94-degree heat and 51 percent humidity -- and up north in Boston thermometers read 93, for a heat index of 101, the national Weather Service said. The temperature at Newark, N.J., already had hit 95.

Even before dawn, the temperature was already above 80 in Nashua, N.H. New York's LaGuardia Airport still had 92 degrees at midnight and eased only to 86 degrees by 6 a.m., the weather service said.
If you're lucky enough not to be afflicted by the ridiculous Fahrenheit system, 100 degrees is 38C, and highs have been up over 40-42c in much of the US, with stifling humidity. It's routinely that hot in the US deserts, but usually with almost zero humidity, and the people there know to expect it.

For instance, it's 85-115 in Death Valley today, (30-46c) but 1) no one sane lives there in the summer, and 2) the humidity is 8%. In a bit more populated place, it's 105 (42c) today in Phoenix, but the humidity is 24%, and it's always 105 in Phoenix in August. Much to Donnie's resigned charin.

It's one of the worst heatwaves in memory, and certainly one of the longest-lasting. How often does the same weather system spread such misery over the entire US, pissing off 300 million people over the course of nearly two weeks? I wonder how I would have felt if the motion were reversed? If the East Coast had gotten it first, and I'd seen daily news items about the furnace coming west. I probably wouldn't have believed it, thinking our proximity to the cold Pacific would help, and remembering how seldom it gets over 90 here, and how there's never humidity when it's that hot. And I would have been wrong, and pretty unhappy about it.

There's more good news; nighttime highs are ever-increasing in the US, so not only is it hotter in the day, it stays hotter at night. Yes, we're all pretty much doomed.

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Comments:

Just wait for the next 15 years as American governments blissfully deny global warming, until it gets to the point where your nights are hotter than your days.


 

Actually, this year has been a lot milder than any in recent memory for us idiots in the desert. Sure, it has been over 100 for damn near every day since Christmas, but the humidity has been pretty non-exisetent.

The monsoon rains that normally come in the afternoon have so far been coming late, late at night or early in the morning. Since the strorms are really the only time the humidity gets above 25%, and they have been happening while I was asleep, I have really hardly noticed the heat at all this summer.

See, so I am happy that when it is 114 outside, it actually feels like 114.

I really do feel for people in other parts of the country though, especially on the east coast, since air conditioning is extremely rare in homes there. I spent one summer in Missouri, and got to see what it really feels like to be in temperatures in the mid 90s with high humidity and no air conditioning, I will take a dry 114 any day. I guess it's like everyone says "it's not the heat, it's the humidity". I never really believed that though, cause if it was true, you could start a fire with a wet rag instead of matches.


 

It's not that I am so picky everytime, but since I'm the lucky user of the non-Farenheit system I must make it straight - 100F is the temperature of healthy human body, which is 36.6 C. 38C is a first sign of fever.


 

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