I was born and raised in the mile high city – aka Denver, Colorado. (The nickname has since become even more appropriate). As you may know, the weather in Colorado is rather chaotic. In the 7th grade, I woke up to a foot of snow that appeared overnight and knocked out our power. My mom sure had a good laugh making me think I was late for school and tricked me into running all the way to there, even though it was canceled. Later as my friends and I went out to enjoy our day off, the sun came out and melted all of the snow by 2pm. But, aside from the chaotic weather that is so characteristic of my hometown, I’d say another defining feature about the climate is how absolutely dry it can be there. When I go back I am at risk of cracked knuckles and bloody noses…not from fighting, just from existing. Regardless, I personally much prefer dry weather to humid weather and for two main reasons: I hate damp towels. Like, can’t I just be dry at…some point? Please!? And moreover, the dry climate makes the chaotic swings in temperature less noticeable and the ‘cold’ winters less harsh. I didn’t truly appreciate that until I moved to Chicago, where it is both colder and more humid.
On a walk next to the lake on a cold Chicago winter day, February 1st, 2015. The humidity was around 89% in Chicago. Denver was actually at an average 83% that day. But Denver's humidity changed like crazy that week. Here are the details.
If you are well versed in winter weather, you might have noticed how 0˚F in Denver feels so much warmer than 0˚F in say, Pennsylvania. Or maybe you’ve just walked outside on different days and noticed that the 25˚F today feels much colder than the 25˚F a week ago. So, why exactly does the humidity make it seem colder in the winter time? Well, as strange as this may (or mot not) sound, it is for the same reason that humidity makes it feel so hot and muggy in the summertime. As I talked about in my post ‘Hot Showers and Global Warming’, water is able to shake at lower frequencies and can thereby trap heat, a lower frequency light. During the summer there is an abundance of heat and it gets trapped in the air by the humidity, making you feel hot and muggy. But, during the winter there is very little heat to be found around…except from our hot bodies. That damn humidity just steals the heat that radiates off of us and thereby makes us feel colder. Looking at it in a slightly different way: The humidity does a better job at conducting heat away from our bodies than the drier air. The higher the humidity, the better the conduction of heat and thereby the quicker your body cools.
Okay. I have to take a physicist moment here to clarify that other factors could be causing similar affects. Wind, for example, can make it feel colder, but not because the heat conduction of the air is increasing, so as much as new air particles (which are colder) are constantly being pushed past your body. Or maybe you are somehow sweating in the middle of winter (hey, it happens to me), then you’re experiencing evaporative cooling. I guess what I am saying is that humidity trapping heat isn’t THE reason you feel cold, but it is one of the many things that COULD explain what is going on. (Science inherently is a specialty of caveats and asterisks, cause it is studying the effects of minute changes in an otherwise complex systems...actually, this is deserves a post. Later).
Okay, back to humidity. I just took two points on a spectrum: dry and humid. As you increase the humidity, you increase the number of heat trapping water molecules, thereby making it easier to steal heat away from you body (or to trap more heat in the summer). But what if you go beyond just being humid and instead you under go a phase transition and the humidity goes from being gas to liquid. Now you have an even higher density of heat trapping humidity, also known as water. This principle of ‘stealing heat’ (or heat conduction) is exactly the reason that you can’t really stand to be in 50˚F water for too long, but you have less of in an issue walking around in cloudy 50˚F weather.
Now, that’s all fine and dandy. Water shakes and absorbs heat. Woohoo. But I’d like to pose a question to you: Does water just shake at one frequency?
Some Earnest Thoughts for later!