• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

What Is Wet Bulb Temperature? Experts Issue Warnings As Heatwave Grips US

June 24, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Well, we’re halfway through 2024, so in keeping with increasingly terrifying tradition, the Northern Hemisphere is melting.

Advertisement

Currently, a heatwave is gripping parts of the US, with temperatures expected to soar above 32.2°C (90°F) in the Southeast, Mid-South, and central/southern Plains, possibly surpassing 37.8°C (100°F) in some parts. The forecast has prompted widespread Heat Advisories and warnings about “wet bulb temperature” – but what exactly is that?

Advertisement

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

What is wet bulb temperature?

Have you ever gone outside in New York on a 30°C (86°F) day, immediately regretted it, and wondered how on Earth anybody could possibly bear the 43°C (110°F) summers of Phoenix?

Or maybe you’ve seen the yearly ritual of Brits complaining about how unbearable their 35°C (95°F) heatwave has been and wondered whether “hot” actually means something different in England.

The thing is, not all heat is created equal, and the same temperature really can be pleasant in one city and pure torture in another. In colloquial terms, you might have heard people talk about “dry heat” being more pleasant than “humid heat”. What makes the difference is often the humidity: the concentration of water vapor in the air. If we compare that to the concentration of water vapor the air could potentially contain at the current temperature, we get the relative humidity. For example, on a day with 1 percent relative humidity – the lowest ever recorded on Earth – the air contains just one percent of the water vapor it potentially could. But on a day with 100 percent relative humidity, the air is fully saturated and can’t take any more.

Advertisement

But that can be a big problem, because humans cool themselves by sweating: the ambient heat evaporates sweat from our skin, and that keeps us from getting too hot. If the relative humidity is already near 100 percent, the air simply can’t take any more. Our sweat doesn’t get evaporated as easily, and we can’t cool down. This makes humid heat not just uncomfortable, but dangerous.

“Physiologically, there’s a point when heat and humidity will become not just uncomfortable, but actually impossible to acclimate to,” Colin Raymond, lead author of a 2020 study into severe heat and humidity, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) at the time. “[T]hese conditions are already happening and only getting worse.”

And that’s where wet-bulb temperatures come in. 

Instead of simply looking at the thermometer to see how hot it is, a wet-bulb temperature is taken by first wrapping the bulb of the thermometer in a wet cloth – hence, “wet bulb”. The cloth acts as a sort of proxy for human skin: if the water evaporates, the thermometer is cooled, and the wet-bulb temperature will be lower than the air temperature. But in high humidity, when the water can’t evaporate as well, this doesn’t happen. Basically, the wet-bulb temperature can be thought of as a measurement of not just how hot it is, but how well humans can expect to cope with it.

Advertisement



The theoretical human limit for wet-bulb temperatures is 35°C (95°F) – around human skin temperature. Any hotter than that, and the body will start to overheat, even if given unlimited water and shade. Luckily, it’s rare for temperatures on Earth to reach these levels – rare, but not unheard of. And the depressingly predictable reason that social media is currently abuzz with this fairly obscure meteorological metric is that this “rare” phenomenon is actually becoming less and less rare as time goes on. That’s right: climate change is literally making the planet unliveable.

“Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” Raymond warned in a statement in 2020. “The times these events last will increase, and the areas they affect will grow in direct correlation with global warming.”

An earlier version of this article was published in June 2021.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Sendoso nabs $100M as its corporate gifting platform passes 20,000 customers
  2. Fed’s Powell: ‘Frustrating’ that supply chain kinks aren’t getting better
  3. Mars Is Spinning Faster Every Year, Making Martian Days Shorter
  4. Is There Really A Link Between Math Skills And Musical Skills?

Source Link: What Is Wet Bulb Temperature? Experts Issue Warnings As Heatwave Grips US

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version