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Another climate exaggeration that really grinds my gears....people from New England who try to claim that summers there are just as hot and humid as the south.
I looked at July 2011 here and few days except heat wave days had heat indices much higher than their temperature. Few days if any days in the 80s got heat indices in the upper 90s. Without heat index, two days got in the upper 90s.
This is a very good point.
Often you will see a subtropical place where the average minimum is in the low 20's C , and seems remotely bearable- but the actual temp when you are trying to go to bed is more like 27C or above, with extra humidity to boot.
This is SO true! Even here when people saw avg temps for BA they said "oh well, but your nights arent bad" "your nights are cool" (seeing our avg low for january was 20.4), and it does not mean that 20.4 is ACTUAL night temperature (yeah right, I WISH!) more like 25-26 celsius, while the 20 usually happen at early morning for like a little while. Since january started, avg low is something like 22 celsius, so this means nights are usually between 25-27 celsius, thats not sleeping weather, and let alone "cool"!
Parts of the NE do have hot and humid summers similar to the South.. Washington DC does, not sure if that's in the NE region or the South East (officially) but it's still similar to NYC
^^ That's not New England though, DC and NYC have completely different climates from New England. I'd say climatically DC has more in common with a place like GA or SC or NC than NH or VT.
Hot days in DC tend to get much more humidity than Western Mass, harder to get hot and not humid further south. I visited in there for a few days in August 2010 and the difference was very obvious. NYC is definitely not as bad as DC, it's kinda in between the two. Breaks of drier air come in NYC more than further south.
Here are a couple of links pertaining to relative humidity as the determinant factor that affects comfort (rather then absolute humidity). The bottom line is that the closer the air is to saturation point, the less perspiration it can absorb. For different reasons, this enhances the feeling of being hot and being cold.
I've seen this idea suggested before. It looks more like conjecture than hard science. I can understand the idea that wet clothes will make one feeler colder, but the heat loss from wet clothes will still happen faster in drier air, at the same temperature. Thats one why dry skin and chapped lips are more likely in lower humidity conditions-the moisture is being evaporated away at a higher rate.
10C/50F would feel cold in Florida, and warmer in Iceland (the warmest month only averages 10.6C/51F in Reykjavik )given the very different climates. It's obviously hard to draw comparisons between the two, but Iceland typically appears to have higher humidity than Florida on days where the average temp is 10C/50F (I couldn't find many days like that in Florida)
People seem to think NYC is perpetually cold/cool and cloudy/overcast. It's actually almost the opposite of that. I don't know where people get this idea from.
Also when people underestimate the heat of the Mid-Atlantic.
I looked at July 2011 here and few days except heat wave days had heat indices much higher than their temperature. Few days if any days in the 80s got heat indices in the upper 90s. Without heat index, two days got in the
upper 90s.
2007 .. I don't need stats to know what I felt I vividly remember laying on the tile floors in the kitchen to cool off and looking out my window at what looked like fog only to see haze alerts. I'm well versed on summers in fla and that summer in nh sucked
People seem to think NYC is perpetually cold/cool and cloudy/overcast. It's actually almost the opposite of that. I don't know where people get this idea from.
Also when people underestimate the heat of the Mid-Atlantic.
Let me take a stab at it (the explanation):
Look at a map of the USA mainland. If you go way back (relatively speaking) say 150 years ago, the principal business cities and largest population centers were concentrated in the northern USA (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburg, Boston,...etc)….the middle Atlantic coastal plain (NYC, Baltimore, Wilmington, Washington DC)… the old subtropical port cities (Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, Savannah…etc)...and the big cities on the West Coast (LA, San Diego, San Francisco…etc) which were just developing.
Relatively speaking, compared to most of the places people knew about (on a national level), NYC was relatively cold compared to southern and West Coast cities. By the 1920’s or 1930’s, once climate data and information about the smaller cities in the Upper Midwest, Mt. West, New England…etc was available, many people realized NYC was warmer in winter than about 40% of towns/cities in the USA. It was probably not common knowledge in 1890 or 1910 that there were towns and cities in the Upper Midwest that had average temperatures 40 to 50 F colder than NYC in January. However, by then it was too late. The legend of NYC and cold was set.
Only recently (1940 and after), with the advent of NWS stations in every area of ever state (including Alaska), we now know that NYC is milder than vast areas on the northern USA in winter.
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