ORLANDO, Fla. – The state of Florida is synonymous with the word hot. We do have occasional cold snaps, but then it’s right back to business as usual.
Believe it or not, during a lot of these cooler days, the temperature really hasn’t changed too much. But yet when we step outside, regardless of the time of day, it feels noticeably nicer. It may even warrant dusting the cob webs off your car’s heater dial!
So why exactly is it we can have 85-degree weather every day for a full week, yet some days feel hotter and others colder? The answer doesn’t lie in the temperature particularly, but the moisture in the air. The moisture being the “humidity.”
Humidity by itself is simply water in the air. For us meteorologists, we look at humidity and another value called “dew point” to determine whether we will see clouds, scattered showers or maybe even some occasional thunder and lightning.
Moisture is a pivotal piece of all things weather, from forming your daily afternoon showers to manifesting a full-fledged tropical hurricane.
Because we live on a peninsula, we are surrounded by water. The warmer oceanic waters around us help keep the water vapor in the air elevated.
It’s during this time of year when we get our blasts of cooler, drier air from up north we get to wash this away for at least a small period of time.
But now the question at hand; what does humidity have to do with what we feel in terms of air temperature? Again, it lies in moisture but in this case, the sweat our bodies produce.
Florida is known to make anybody sweat! This is our natural way of cooling down when the humidity is maxed out and the temperature is cranking in the upper 90s all summer.
When humidity is high, it slows down the evaporation of our sweat. Evaporation dissipates heat, which is the reason why we produce it when our core temperature starts to go up.
During these pushes of cooler air, the introduction of drier air helps the evaporation process along and allows us to feel remarkably cooler. Whenever a front comes down, that front marks the leading edge of a whole new air mass. What this means is the traditional soupy, muggy air Florida is known for is bullied out of the way to make room for air that originates much further north of us. It only sticks around so long because of a process called “modification.” But we can talk about that more later!
Humidity ties to both temperature and heat index. Each of these variables play a role in your forecast and how you go about your day whenever you set foot out the door.
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily:
