It you can’t stand the heat, well, tough.

It’s felt really hot and miserable across the southeast recently, but it’s about to get worse. As a reminder, by far your best source of weather hazard data is the National Weather Service, not commercial or social media sources, especially for events that can and will be dramatized for profit. In the case of our beloved Frogmore Metroplex (the northern coast of Georgia and the South Carolina Low Country), that is the NWS Forecast Office (WSFO) in Charleston, SC. This is their area of responsibility, centered of course on Frogmore itself …

Today their weather briefing pulls no punches as to the upcoming misery expected this weekend:

Two factors are converging here: above normal temperatures, combined with above normal humidity. This exacerbates a trend this year of higher humidity. Yes, given the drought, that seems contradictory, but even during our rainless periods humidity has often run 5 to 8% above normal. That has a big impact on the heat index (aka “feels like” temperature). How much? Consider this:

Yesterday, at our office near Daffin Park (midtown Savannah), our high was 91F. Typically the humidity would be 56%. That gives us a heat index (HI) of 99.7F. But yesterday the humidity was 66%, yielding a miserable HI of 106.1. If we hit the expected high of 95 tomorrow, that gets us a HI of 118.6! If you’re curious, here’s a link to more on the heat index and how it is calculated.

A caution here: beware of super high HI numbers. The calculation is based evaporation of sweat from your skin, and at some point it just stops working, so much above 115 or so for most people your misery/danger is maxed out and it’s not going to get any more miserable. But don’t mistake this carries a serous potential of heat related injuries.

Another factor is that it’s just not cooling off at night. That means your A/C is having to work hard all day and all night, much to the distress of your wallet. And thermal inertia in buildings is a thing as well.

The issue of climate change always comes up with these kinds of events. It has become so political it’s hard to discuss, reporting on it by the media so bad, combined with exaggeration by various advocacy groups, has made it so that the information space is totally corrupted. That said …

Climate change (global warming) wasn’t ever really so much about daytime highs in summer. I remember doing runs in the mid/late 1990s that showed pretty much what we are seeing today, higher humidities but below normal rain, not cooling off at night, even abnormal cool spells in spring. The bottom line is that the higher humidity and it not cooling off at night were predictions made by the climate models over 20 years ago. Every year that goes by we get more data to say the Earth is changing in un-natural ways. The problem is that by the time we can say for sure “yep, that was anthropogenic climate change,” it’s too late to do much about it – if it isn’t already.

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