It’s not yet 9 am here, and the weather site says it “feels like” 103. What the hell does that mean? As a point of reference, I have no idea what 103 “feels like”, because when it is actually 103, it “feels like” 115. So what is the meaning of that climatalogical data?
Apparently, in recent years, the geniuses who pretend they can forecast the weather have recalibrated their “feels like” heat index, and in summer here, the “feels like” is nearly always 12-15 degrees higher than the actual reading. And I bet none of the forecasters ever verify their instruments by going outside and saying “Yup, it feels like 115, so the instruments are right on.”
Which doesn’t answer my question. How do they know what 103 feels like, if it doesn’t feel like 103 when the temperature is 103? A person living in a place that is always humid has no frame of reference to know that 103 feels like when it is not humid. When the temperature here is 87, it always feels like 103, so how do I know what 87 “feels like”? Well, it feels like 103.
Just a pointer - RH tells you next to nothing about comfort by itself. It’s a derived figure that means very little unless, well, you know what it means. RH is often very high at night, but at 50-60 degrees you don’t care. You only notice high RH when the temps are high as well.
You want a real comfort index? Look at the dew point temperature instead. It’s a more direct measurement of humidity and not (as) relative to temperature. A DP under 50 is comfortable, under 40 is very comfortable to dry, and over 60-65 is getting pretty sticky.
It’s also much harder to measure, especially with consumer-grade (Target-price) gear, so it’s ignored in favor of the misleading but easy to read RH. But it’s on most weather panel/pages.
When it’s hot and humid, you can’t cool yourself through sweating as well, so it feels hotter out. I’m not sure why humid air feels cool when the air temperature is low but my guess is that the air has a higher heat capacity when it’s humid, so it absorbs body heat from you more efficiently than dry air.
“feels like” usually refers to a thing called “the heat index”; a system for categorizing ranges of temperature in correlation with humidity. Here is a link to OSHA’s webpage and heat index Basically, that’s what “feels like” means when referring to temperature. When I was in the army, they had an additional category of black, all outside activity was suspended or severely curtailed, trouser legs were unbloused, and sometimes even uniform tops (bdu’s back in my day, acu’s or some such today) were removed
ok, not sure why the link won’t work umm maybe a mod can help?
“feels like” doesn’t include just the humidity but also the wind. If it’s humid and windy it feels a lot colder than a dry still day, and a non-humid windy hot day feels a lot cooler than other types of days. That said, I personally am not a very good thermometer. I have thresholds of temperature I recognize but they tend to span a 20 degree range within which it all pretty much feels the same.
