When I got up this morning, one of the first things I did was to check the temperature and humidity — and it was 84 degrees and 24% relative humidity. Those are unusual values for an early summer morning; more normal would be in the high 50s or low 60s for temperature, and 40% or higher for humidity. Even stranger — you can see that the temperature hardly varied at all last night. For the first night in a long time, we kept the windows shut, and the air conditioner kicked in several times (very rare at night).
Now today the temperature is at 102 as I write this (it looks lower on the graphs because they’re averaging the readings over an hour), while the humidity is down to just 3%. This is the kind of weather that just sucks all the moisture right out of the plants and organic material. If we have too many days like this, the fire danger will climb to “critical” (right now it’s at “moderate").
And it’s darned uncomfortable to be outdoors — it feels like you’re in an oven, even when you’re in the shade.
But we have to be thankful we don’t live in an area with high humidity; we only have to imagine what this heat would feel like with, say, 90% relative humidity…
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