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Old 01-24-2016, 08:47 PM
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Location: Western Massachusetts
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Originally Posted by tommyFL View Post
It doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of moderating Pinnacles' summer max temps. Obviously not much ocean influence there.
Ocean influence is strongest in the evening and at night, midday the ocean influence is more limited to the immediate coast. Obviously there's also some strong radiational cooling at Pinnacles. It must mean something that the nightly average summer lows in California west of the Central Valley are very similar even daytime maxes aren't.
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Old 01-24-2016, 09:44 PM
 
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Originally Posted by existant View Post
I wonder if it has something to do with how cold it feels, physiologically, when you're adjusted to really hot daytime temperatures.



Are people pretty active at night there in the summers due to that?
Some people are. I used to live in Kuwait and it was way too hot at night to do anything. Hell, it was way too hot even at 4 in the morning. The only activity that is enjoyable is swimming in a chilled pool, where you can enjoy the contrast between the cold water and the hot night air. But you do need to chill the pool, even at night. It's the same type of pleasure as being in a hot tub outdoors in winter, but in reverse.

The shamal wind is very frequent as well. It's a type of foehn wind that occurs almost exclusively between May and September. Air from Turkey gets lifted over the Kurdish mountains, descends and warms on the south slopes and travels across the Iraqi desert towards Kuwait and Saudi. This wind maintains night temperatures above 40 degrees C until midnight on many summer nights.

Last edited by arctic_gardener; 01-24-2016 at 09:57 PM..
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Old 01-25-2016, 12:34 AM
 
Location: Westminster/Huntington Beach, CA
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The low deserts in the southwest have warm nights (>75F) usually between May and October. Especially the Colorado and Sonoran deserts of California and Arizona.

The high deserts, between 2,000 and 4,000 feet, such as the Mojave desert can get very cold between October and May and often times get snow in winter. It usually only lasts a day or two.

Speaking of the Mojave, another misconception about deserts is that they are barren/lifeless, yet the Mojave desert is known to support up to 2,000 species of plants. It's also the driest of the North American deserts which makes that even more significant.
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Old 01-25-2016, 08:21 AM
 
Location: Atlanta
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All my life I've waiting to see an example of this and I'm still waiting. Really it's a noted climate feature (large diurnal temp range) taken to extreme exaggeration. People make it sound like you can get hypothermia in Phoenix in July.
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Old 01-25-2016, 10:48 AM
 
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Like all of you, I think it's an annoying stereotype, etc, etc.
However, why is it still so frequently heard, and it even comes up in geography books...

I guess it is reminiscent from the old journeys through the deserts, where people with few or no amenities had to employ many days to get from a settlement to another, and on their way they faced nothing but sand/naked rock and some isolated shrubs. Not a single tree, or a course of water, or any man-made building. No shelter at all bar your skimpy tent. Imagine a day whose extremes are 13ºC/31ºC. All day under the sun and having to rationalise water must have been exhausting, while the temperature just over the sand could reach 50ºC. Then at night, in the middle of nowhere, totally exposed to the wind, it can feel pretty chilly and uncomfortable, with temperatures of 10ºC just over the sand. There you have the range of 40ºC.

Obviously you can't compare unsheltered temperatures with standarized figures, it's apples and oranges, and it is here where the misconception begins, as a person would compare such temperatures with the figures he/she sees on a daily basis on TV and thinks "oh, that's incredible".

The keys are the absence of shelter, which makes you have to deal with the weather in its toughest possible way, and the scarcity of water and other amenities, which harden the whole experience.
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