Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
Once temps hit more than 37C and 100% humidity, the human body loses the ability to regulate it’s temperature through sweating.
1-100 Celsius is about water freezing —> boiling and I’ve always been confused about why it’s so eminently logical to understand the weather by that scale.
1-100 Fahrenheit, meanwhile, is a really reasonable approximation of the habitable range of temperatures.
And you just showed this by having to establish for everyone that the upper bound of habitability is 37C. A completely random number anyone would forget.
No one “forgets” temperatures dude, 17°C might be meaningless to you but to me it’s just shirt and light jacket weather. Nobody forgets what the body temperature in Celsius is. It’s two digits, your brain can do it.
Fahrenheit simply puts the human at the center where physical phenomena like water freezing and boiling happen at “random” points on its scale, while Celsius takes two simple, constant (as long as you’re not on a mountain), verifiable points based on physics, where the temperature of a human body falls on a “random” place on it.
The point is very simple: if you have an unlabeled thermometer and need to calibrate it, you stick it in freezing water, mark 0, stick it in boiling water, mark 100, divide into equal segments, and it will be exactly right. If you want to do the same for Fahrenheit, you need another reference thermometer. (Unless you happen to have the same unspecified mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride that Fahrenheit supposedly originally used to mark the 0 point)
I am sorry, but you are wrong, however you are not wrong at what you might expect me to call you out on.
There is nothing inherently superior with F for “habitable” temps, both C and F works fine for that, for me who is used to C, talking about body temps of 37 makes sense to me, for me 98.6 seems completely wrong.
It all boils down to what we are used to.
It’s funny how it’s supposed to be great to measure “human temperatures”, yet 98.6 is normal and 100 is a fever.
I’d much rather know if I should expect ice or wet pavement outside than whatever 1 degree F is. What’s the difference to me, functionally, between 0 and 1 degrees F?
And 100 degrees F could be a nice day or an absolute hell depending on humidity. So it’s still not useful.
You just think it makes more sense because it’s what you are used to.
Fahrenheit wanted repeatable, laboratory-friendly reference points, not abstract physics.
These were the anchor points:
They could have chosen 100 °F for the human body, but then the math works out oddly for other common calculations (e.g., the freezing point of water is ~33.33). They went with 96 because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, and 4 (perfect for halving, quartering, and thirding with 18th-century tools). This placed the freezing point of water at exactly 1/3 the way up to the top anchor of 96.
It’s a system designed for convenience with ancient tools and ways-of-life. The boiling point of water wasn’t used because it was too difficult to reliably reproduce at the time.
What stands out here is that this does not necessarily model after some kind of “habitability zone.” Such a zone is only prescribed post-hoc, with the conventional understanding of Fahrenheit -> comfortability conveniently engrained in your intuitive reflex already.
The truth is, habitability changes based on factors like humidity too. I’ve experienced 120F that wasn’t so bad, dare I say it was a “nice toasty summer.” In contrast, I’ve experienced 75F with very high humidity and I wanted to die.
Boiling water hard to reliably reproduce? What?
As a temperature that could be consistently referenced with then-modern technology, yeah. You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.
Yup. Wet-bulb conditions are no joke and can kill, making functioning A/C a life-saving technology if not an outright requirement for survival.
I’ve worked in mines in the desert in South Australia where temps semi regularly hit 46-47 degrees.
It’s OK (ish) because the humidity is low. But you can drink a litre an hour all day (11+ hours) and not need to pee. All that water goes somewhere.
The underground workings are often more dangerous, with lower temperatures but higher humidity. Once wet bulb temps get above 34 degrees underground personnel need to retreat from the area and the only work that can be done there then is work to fix the ventilation.
There’s heat stress meters that measure wet and dry bulb temperatures and airflow, and can basically compute cooling power in watts. Not enough cooling power -> everyone out.
I can only imagine, as I sit on the Stockholm metro with cold and damp feet after walking through snow and some slush to get to the bus earlier.
I am happy to hear that you have rules and regulations for these eventualities.
Yeah, in those conditions, you live and die by wet bulb temperatures.
Actually at 100% humidity the highest survivable temperature for a human is 35 C° wet bulb temperature.
But that is with everything else being perfect, being healthy, in the shade, and perfectly hydrated, and zero physical activity.
A more realistic maximum survivable wet bulb temperature is closer to 30 C°. But 35 C° is the absolute maximum, where above that everybody dies.
Sorry, but that’s wrong. WBGT takes radiative heat into effect when it’s calculated. The sun and shade effectively have two different WBGT readings. That’s why its measured with a black globe. Protocol is to measure ~2 meters heigh in direct sunlight away from structures that block wind so you get the worse case scenario. Like any whether reading, its localized.
It’s dry as a bone here right now. (That’s good)
Also means it’s all a big tinderbox. (That’s bad)
It makes evaporative air conditioners work better (That’s good)
Isn’t this called wet bulb or something and lethal?
That was it, yes!