Is it really that much more miserable outside in July? Why yes, it is. Here’s a graph of the monthly average, high, and low dew points at DCA.*
Ask people who don’t like hot, humid weather, and they’ll tell you that the weather measurement they rely on most is dew point.
Not temperature. Not relative humidity. Dew point.
“I think it’s catching on,” said meteorologist Paul Douglas. “It a superior way to, at a glance, determine what it really feels like out there.” Bill McAuliffe, Star-Tribune
I’m among those dew point fans. It, not the temperature or the heat index, best describes how it feels to be bicycling here. A hot and somewhat humid day may have a dew point of 70, identical to a cooler and off/on rainy day (of the sort we’ve had a lot of lately), but the net result is still getting drenched in sweat. My guideline for how I’ll feel when stopped (at lights, after riding):
<50 = no sweat, wear regular clothing
60 = nice, maybe change clothes at work
65 = acceptable but pushing it, go slow or get damp
70 = gross with sweat, definitely change shirt frequently
75 = I’d rather it rain, because either way I’m drenched
80 = instant dripping upon setting foot outside, can’t breathe
85 = kill me now, for surely Hades must be cooler than this
The article gives a good analogy: the dew point is the lowest temperature that it’s possible for sweat to cool your skin down to. I get uncomfortable at 70 and cranky at 80, and that corresponds nicely with the dewpoint guidance above.
The world’s highest dew points are around the Persian Gulf; high temps evaporate a lot of seawater into the air. The Plains and the South get high humidity mostly from plant transpiration.
I haven’t found the perfect weather app yet, so in the meantime I’ll dream of a 1×1 Android widget that displays what I really care about: dew point, wind speed/direction, and % chance of precipitation. Oh, and maybe temperature: at least one article (Jillian Strauss & Luis Miranda-Moreno, “Spatial modeling of bicycle activity at signalized intersections“) finds that humidity, then precipitation, then temperature determine cycling levels, even in cool Montreal.
Oh, and incidentally, this is one reason why I find European criticisms of how Americans dress while cycling to be so annoying. The average August dew point in Amsterdam? 58F (average monthly temperature is 64F). Their most humid August ever had a dew point of 72F, just above the *normal* dew point here. Of course they dress normally: they can. I spent several days biking around Paris during the catastrophic August 2003 heat wave; it was hot, with temperatures around 100F, but dew points were around 60F. That’s actually kinda nice weather by D.C. standards.
Which brings me to another pet peeve: the outdoors/activewear industry is overwhelmingly clustered in the West, which has much more courteous weather than the East or the South. Thus, “soft shell” outerwear appropriate for Cascadian drizzle leaves me drenched within minutes of venturing out into a thundershower, messenger bags pool up back sweat whereas back-saving panniers are hard to find, and everything’s much too casual for a city filled with dark suits. Most of humanity lives in the tropics, not in balmy Mediterranean or chilly North Sea climates, and it’s about time that fashion recognized that fact.
* Bear in mind that these are for entire months, days and nights, and that the high/low numbers are still averaged out over the course of an entire month, so individual days will certainly differ substantially. Also, to the extent that the region has microclimates, DCA probably has the highest dewpoints of the local airports with its low elevation, river frontage, and relatively high urban heat island exposure. Upland areas might be slightly more bearable.