It's Another Yankee Forecast Today
On the intranet weather report, we’ve added two new temperature/humidity sensors (WN31) to monitor the garage and the three-season porch. While the porch is enclosed for the cold season(s), temperatures are often the hottest in the house! The garage has become more important as LLL grew tomatoes this year, on a rolling cart and a totable bucket, and we would bring them in during inclement, especially extra-cold weather. On November 1, we’re still harvesting tomatoes, in New Hampshire!
Alert weather watchers observed the websites (https://wx.iayft.com, https://contoocook.org and https://contoocook.org/cell.php) were offline Sunday morning, July 27th. My internet hosting provider (Linode/Akamai) had a long-term site power outage and troubled recovery of their HVAC systems resulting in a long, slow, manual restoration. The were good about keeping their users informed. I expect many lessons were learned and I’m looking forward to the follow-up to the incident. No data was lost, and the sites are back up and running now. If anyone notices anomalies, let me know using the “Contact” form linked above.
Yesterday, June 23rd had a high temperature of 97.9°F, a record for the day, a heat index of 116.0°F and a dew point of 81.0°F! Today is expected to be similar. making an early New England heat wave, 3 days over 90°F.
97°F on the mercury and 115.5°F on the heat index
The Partners in Emergency Preparedness (https://piepc.org/) host a monthly seminar on relavant topics, and this month hosted Bruce Jones, a meteorologist and spokesperson for Midland Radio, to talk about the history of public alert systems and the work that they are doing now. Bruce is a long-time broadcaster and put on an entertaining, organized and informative show! I encourage everyone with an interest to watch and keep an eye on PIEPC.org for future shows!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Z1xtIaAoM
Okay, it’s not boiling hot in Tooky on the Eve of Christmas Eve. As of this morning 6:45am, it was -5.4℉ in Tooky. But that means, combined with the high temperature of 95.2℉ on June 20th, Contoocook saw a range of over 100℉ over the year.
That’s a tad warmer than usual, but nowhere near a record for low temperatures. It’s been -17℉ in previous years during this week, and in the past 33 years, I once saw -33℉ and, boy, that’s cold weather for a dog walk! Stay warm and enjoy the holiday season!
Recently browsing the web site, I saw that warnings had been posted for the Portsmouth and Rockingham areas and clicked for more details. The most unbelievable warning popped up — Tsunami Warning! Really? Immediately, the HUGE list of affected areas, starting with “Laguna Madre From the Port of Brownsville to the Arroyo Colorado” had me suspect someone accidentally spilled coffee on the Big Red Button or something. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling finally got to the actual text, which started out: THIS_MESSAGE_IS_FOR_TEST_PURPOSES_ONLY. Whew! You coulda lead with that…
The alert was gone a moment later.
(with apologies to the band Chicago)
Last summer, I was watching temperatures rise in the wicked heat, and I noticed the “feels like” temperature displayed on the weather station web site was sky-high, 108°F on a mid-90 degree day. I checked the reported “feels like” on the local sensor gateway G!100 and on the WeeWx data page, and it was only a few degrees above the plain temperature. What the heck was going on?
Well, it seems like we can’t agree on what “feels like” means. Everyone knows a 90°F day with low humidity and a little breeze is tolerable, if a little hot for us northerners. But the same 90°F with 90 humidity and still winds has everyone reaching for the A/C, a fan, and some ice water.
With the increasing frequency and intensity of the heat, vigorous occupations and sports have focused on the danger of serious heat-related injuries and fatalities. Surely, there must be some standards to apply to the situation.
Well, we like standards so much we’ve made dozens!
“Feels Like” or “Apparent Temperature” is a calculation of temperature and humidity and wind speed created in 1984. While relatively easy to calculate, this really only applies to indoor situations where solar heating is not a factor.
“Humidex” is a similar calculation more common in Canada (and was also the standard on the weather software I was using, hence the difference in values).
Wet-bulb temperature deserves a mention here, although it’s not a measure of “feels like,” but is often confused with the next one. A thermometer is wrapped in a wet cloth sock, and the temperature will differ from dry air temperature by the cooling effect of the water evaporating (absorbing its “latent heat of vaporization” if that rings bells from science classes) and can be used to calculate relative humidity with a simple mechanical device called a “sling psychrometer” and a simple lookup table. This is popular where complex or delicate instrumentation isn’t a good choice, such as the logging industry or grade-school science classes.
Wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is currently the most popular for calculating heat stress, the combined effects of temperature, wind, humidity and heat (solar radiation or other heat sources). It uses a dry-air temperature, a wet-bulb temperature for humidity, the temperature inside a black globe exposed to the sun or heat source, and factors in the wind for evaporative effects to create an estimate of how hot it really feels. This estimate is rapidly becoming an important guideline in sports, industry and governmental regulations.
A great article on WGBT can be found here.
Finally, we can’t forget the “RealFeel™” a trademarked and patented proprietary calculation by Accuweather.com. Using similar calculations and factors above, as well as combining special factors of their own, Accu
So, keep in mind when you hear the day is going to “feel like” that there’s a bit of disagreement on what exactly that means, and how it is measured. But, hey, be careful out there.
Alert weather watchers (do you guys ever take a day off??!!!??) noted that the site went a little sideways yesterday. The main thermometer thought the high and low for the day was 32°F, the winds and other basic parameters were not right, and some of the supplementary pages failed to load or generated a pageful of errors. Hopefully, it’s working better today.
A junior web operator who shall remain nameless attempted to check the web sites’ configuration files into Git and instead loaded in the entire site, including dynamically updated data files and cached files. This means Git will pretty much always report the repository is out of date, and make cloning amd redeployment a serious hazard. In fixing the issue, the problem compounded: it turns out the “git rm” command does not remove the file from git as one might suspect, but instead OBLITERATES THE WORKING FOLDER OF PRODUCTION DATA and marks the file retained in (for historical purposes), but no longer active in the repository. Removing live data and cached files while the website is running had predictably disastrous results. Management has been notified and stern lectures delivered about diddling with the live production site without making three backups while clicking your heels together.
The management wishes to apologize to anyone who just wanted to know what the weather was outside. Yesterday, you would have had to go out IRL and look for yourselves; today, you can check on your phone again.