I'm not saying that because of changing the page on the calendar. From the feel of being outside, it has been August for a few weeks. Heck, I know a guy who has a lawn service business and he was saying it has been full tilt summer since about day 1: the solstice back on June 21.
A sure indicator is when the UV Index says 11 on a scale of 1-10 and uses the description, "Potentially Fatal." We know that's aimed at visitors to the area who aren't used to it and don't pay much attention.
There are many places where folks look forward to summer; it's time to go
outside - maybe for the first time in months, enjoy warm, glorious days;
garden, bike, picnic; maybe enjoy a book while lounging on the beach.
Songs like Nat King Cole's classic "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer" come to
mind.
That's not here. Here, summer is something to be a bit more reserved
about. If you live here, you can keep up with your regular life.
If you were from a moderate place, not used to our heat and humidity, running
or other outdoors activity could conceivably kill you. August marks the
Dog Days of Summer; everything outdoors slows. Fishing slows - sure the
fish have to eat, but they become more active after dark. Animals are
more sluggish. Ordinarily, it can be nasty here from about mid-July to
almost the middle of September. The worst of it is August.
The Minnesotans for Global Warming cherish the summer and endure the winter. Here it's the opposite.
When we first got an HDTV around 20 years ago, Mrs. Graybeard and I naturally spent much
of our TV time searching out HD programming. One of the first movies we
watched was "The Chronicles of Riddick". You have to understand this is not even particularly good
scifi. It's a fun movie to watch, it's a visual treat, it's a fantastic
display of special effects perfect for HD, but don't pay too much attention to
the story. To quote a review (long gone from the net), "Furyans,
Necromongers, Elementals, The Underverse, the Threshold...it so clearly wants
to be epic that it forgets to tie all of these disparate worlds, universes and
civilizations into a coherent story. (Director) Twohy clearly makes the
mistake of not realizing that there is a huge difference between being grand
and being simply confusing and the more ideas that are introduced, the more
lumbering it becomes…"
We still watch it on occasion when we run into it.
A large portion of the movie, and one of the longest action sequences, takes
place on the planet Crematoria (many of the names in the movie are that
cheesy). Crematoria is a planet that has a tremendous temperature
variation (probably an impossible amount) with daytime temperatures of 700F
and night time temperatures 300 below zero. When the sunrise terminator
sweeps through, the force of the heat gales that come with it is literally
enough to blow you apart, disintegrating flesh and blowing pieces off until
you die. There's a scene where a character (Purifier), a Furyan like
Riddick, sacrifices himself by walking into the sunrise terminator and
self-immolating. That's him trying to stand up to the gales while being
set afire and having pieces of burning flesh blown off him.
The first time I saw that scene, it reminded me of the time we decided to do a long bike ride on July 4th (I think it was a hundred mile ride, but for sure it was a virtually all day ride). I mentioned it to Mrs. Graybeard who said, "sure, we've been out on days like that."
The National Weather Service publishes charts for heat index that show the
amount of danger from the combination of heat and humidity. This is one
of their charts. I've drawn a box around the typical morning conditions
here. When I finished my ride this morning, Weather Underground was reporting 86 with a "feels like" temperature of 96. On the top right side of that box I added. "Extreme caution" conditions are common. In the afternoon,
it pushes farther into the orange, maybe red.
Oh, and for those greenies and others pushing the idea that Americans are lazy for having air conditioning because they don't do that in Europe. Our latitude is well south of Europe, like toward the south end of the Sinai Peninsula. Sharm el-Sheikh airport is just a few miles south of our latitude. All of Europe is well north of us.
It's been off-and-on "muggy" here, with temps in the 90's, and 20~30% RH. And being above 5000' of the atmosphere, the UV index here hits "11" quite often.
ReplyDeleteI think August is the worst of the summer most everywhere. The year we went to Glacier NP, it was in the mid-90s a couple of weeks before our trip. The big difference is that by the last week of the month it was snowing. On our first night there and again once later in the week.
DeleteTrust me. People from Israel think Florida is too friggin hot and muggy. That tells you something about how miserably hot it is here.
ReplyDeleteHere in North Central Florida (think: the north spine of Florida) we don't even get the sea breezes. Instead we get the various funks and still air because it's all swamps, oak hammocks, flat sections and water. Nice during winter, because we actually get cool and cold winter air. During SUMMER? Bleh. A heavy sweater like me can mildew from going in and out of blessed AC.
And, of course, my apartment AC has been acting up since March (warm winter, hotter spring) and the management company is finally doing something soon. Apparently a bunch of air handlers in our complex are all old and in various states of dying, and the previous manager, who decided to spend most of her work time working from her apartment (well, actually, smoking waaaaaay too much weed on work time) didn't get any work orders processed. Hmmm... Weed and not doing one's job. No wonder she's the ex-manager.
The sea breeze makes this place much more livable. We always used to take a walk in the evening after work and it was always pleasant in the evening with the sea breeze. August was the least pleasant time of year, but still saved by the sea breeze.
DeleteHowever... August where you are with no AC is a human rights violation.
Or should be.
I lived in dorms at UF without A/C. They'd been wired in the 1920s, I think. August sucked. We had big fundraisers at schools in the late 1970s to buy window A/C units for classrooms in Pensacola. I fucking hate Florida summer.
DeleteMy high school was partially built pre-central air. So a lot of the rooms had windows on the south and north sides, and motel style a/c units. There was one section that was built in a rectangle with an inner courtyard open to the sky, again, with motel style a/c units.
DeleteOnly the chemistry and biology building had central air.
Why is this important? Because the high school (Satellite High) was on the beach, or just off of it. And we got East-West and West-East winds during the day, and North-South in the morning, South-North in the evening. So during the heat of the day, you know, when you're going to school, any nice breeze would be not picked up by opening the windows.
The physics room, which was on the south side of that enclosed courtyard structure, routinely got temps up to 100.
Yeah, bleh. Don't miss that.
Wake me when it's September?
ReplyDeleteSPF three million? I'm sure SPF 5000 would do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oJzfmWO3CU
ReplyDeleteWay back when I endured two summers in Pensacola, we (Army) did PT at 0500, because the Navy didn't wake up to hang out the black flag until 0600. 95 (degrees) and 95 (percent humidity) at 05. I only passed out once.
ReplyDeleteSE Texas here, I feel all of that. I have 8 dogs i walk twice a day. Broke up into 3 groups that gives me 6 walks a day to "schedule". Plus any other outside work. Basically start as soon as I can see in the mornings and just before pitch dark in the early evening. I'm drinking water and Electrolytes all day to replace everything that melts out of me all day.
ReplyDeleteGrew up in the Florida Panhandle so I appreciate both heat & humidity. My wife & I lived in Jax and would go to St Augustine for weekend trips in the late summer (Aug or Sept). Our entertainment was watching tourists on St George Street, generally wearing something 'fashionable', try to enjoy themselves. Yes, that's pretty evil but it was humorous...
ReplyDeleteSpent 12 years in the state, on both coasts and from Tampa Bay latitude down to Miami. I concur with all you say, and Crematoria is a perfect reference. But why do you say a tech civilization couldn't exist there without AC? Too hot inside their house designs of preference? In the 1950's most places did not have it (my grandmothers house was an artistic study in high ceilings and jalousie windows).
ReplyDeletePeople live in places that are much worse, actually -- like anything between you and the equator. They don't much have civilizations because all the urge to accomplish anything is sucked right out of them by the heat and humidity.
You just have to ask yourself why people live there at all. Summertime in Florida might as well be living in an air-conditioned can in orbit.
That's a really good point, and my wife and I were talking about that last night. When I was a kid, we didn't have AC at all, then room units slowly got added; first mom & dad (besides the obvious "because we're you're parents", dad worked the night shift for the USPS so he needed to sleep until about noon), then big brother and finally the "runt of the litter", me. School didn't have AC until high school. We didn't have a window unit in the living room until high school, too.
DeleteThis neighborhood is built with the majority of houses aligned along an East/West line. I have one tiny window on the east wall, which is where the prevailing winds are from, except the layout of houses reduces those winds. No chance for winds to blow through. Early settlers here all built with huge windows on east and west for blow through cooling and no houses in the way.
On the other hand, a manufacturing business, like the electronics companies I worked in all my life, would be a pretty tough thing to do without good environmental control - temperature and humidity.
I grew up in a fairly arid climate. In my 20s, I spent two summers in Houston, much of it doing outdoor labor. Boy did that get my attention.
ReplyDeleteI've now spent 26 years in the Kansas City area. It is way more humid than where I grew up, but much better than Houston. As I write this, it is 99.0 degrees out side with a heat index of 109.4. A short distance away in the area along the Missouri River bottom in the area where I worked before retiring it is 104.4 withe a heat index of 118.8 degrees. Where I grew up in Texas (Amarillo), it is 97.0 with a heat index of 95.7 degrees (lower than actual temp!). The Dewpoint here is 74, but in Amarillo it is 56, and that is considered on the humid side there. Houston is actually one degree lower dewpoint and a degree cooler than Kansas City today, so this is a worse than normal summer day here today. Glad I'm retired and sitting inside an air conditioned house.
When I get home from working my shift in the hospital, it is around midnight. At midnight, the outside temperature is 80 degrees F. The dewpoint is 77 degF. The morning low is 77 degrees, beginning at 3 am and staying there until after sunrise. So our morning low is dewpoint limited, meaning that we start our day at 100 percent humidity. We peaked at 99 degrees this afternoon at around 3:30.
ReplyDeleteAs I type this, it is 5 pm, and the outside temperature is 96 degF, giving us a humidity of 55 degF. There is no breeze to speak of- 1.6 miles per hour from the west. The only real break from the heat that we get is from the thinderstorms generated by the daily seabreeze front, but those are a mixed blessing. You cool off by about 15 degrees, but the dewpoint rises, taking the humidity up with it.
Historically, the heat won't begin to break until about the middle of September. Even then, we will have lows in the 70's and highs in the low 90s.
Slab on grade houses dictate mechanical climate control along the Gulf Coast. Old houses were built off the ground with floor and ceiling vents to draw relatively cool air into the house. Here in Savannah a lot of the older houses in the historic district have cupolas with either candles, oil lamps or natural gas burners to create an even stronger chimney effect. It made the south somewhat livable in the old days, but, is no substitute for glorious chilled air. ;)
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, RayRay. The older houses where I grew up in Illinois were built similarly. I always wondered why the older houses stayed cooler than the newer ones back then. Now I know!
DeleteAnd all those upper story porches? Those are sleeping porches. During the summer you moved your bed (and mosquito netting) outside.
DeleteMe? I prefer central air.
Google around for 'dog trot houses' and 'Florida Cracker'-style. They were built with mitigating the long humid summers of the South in mind. Off-grade was done for a reason.
DeleteThe Piedmont area of NC, at least our little microclime of it, has been miserable this year. I have a screencap of my weather station for 7/23: 99 degrees and 73% humidity, for a "feels like" of 142. And it did feel like it-I was out in the yard and had just finished up and come inside and wondered "Gee, I wonder how hot it is out there?"
ReplyDeleteThis is why women outlive men.