Incredible Heat, Humidity Readings

AccuWeather.com Professional's Joe Bastardi says today in his blog "it's not the heat, it's the humidity" that will make this week's heat wave historical.

I think this is an exciting departure from past heat waves, and I'll post this evening the highest dew points, RealFeels, and Apparent Temperatures (Heat Indexes) that have been achieved. Unfortunately, the government doesn't really maintain records for combinations of heat and humidity, so we may have to take Joe at his word. And we'll keep an eye out for new record-high minimum temperatures tonight. Memories are short, though, so we'll have to be reasonable (low temps were in the low 80s in Virginia just last year).

Yesterday, RealFeel or Apparent Temperatures in the 110's were not uncommon. The image shown at right is Apparent Temperatures at 2 p.m. There were three stations that stood out from the crowd. They are shown below, in a table which lists the station name, code, and then RealFeel, Apparent and Dew Point temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit:

*I also noted dew points in from the two closest stations (if available). Dew points in the upper-eighties are thought extremely rare, perhaps impossible. Forgiving proximity to water, you'd think these readings were not reliable, I mean really -- A RealFeel temperature of 145 seems outrageous.

Astonishingly, ONE OR MORE OF THEM MAY BE ACCURATE. It's interesting that nearby stations reported dew points in the 80's (something I didn't expect). So either Joe's right or there are a LOT of government dew point sensors malfunctioning out there.

Of the three, the most likely one to be correct is Emporia. In fact we're forecasting a RealFeel of 135 today in Emporia. Of course, our forecasts take in current readings as well, so this might be throwing it off (the following screen capture was taken from AccuWeather.com today at noon):

It also made for an interesting graph.

P.S.: Here's the unusually-warm sea-surface temperatures Joe was talking about: