I feel heat illness coming on just looking out the window. Heat index is 113 here right now. I believe I will just let those weeds grow!

And... our air conditioner just died as I was reading this thread. LOL

Diane

Imp, Let the weeds grow! Maybe the heat and humidity will kill them.

Diane, I hope, hope, hope you are kidding.

I lasted for 3 hours outside today, from about 6:30 a.m. to about 9:30 a.m. I didn't look at the heat index when I first came inside, but by 11:00 a.m. it was 107 and I brought the dogs inside to keep them cool. This is ridiculously hot weather. I saw a lot of heat indices today on the OK Mesonet map in the 100-and-teens category....like 113, 116, etc. Those are about the hottest ones I've ever noticed here in Oklahoma.

We might as well be in Florida or Louisiana since we're having their type of humidity. I looked at my tomato plants a few minutes ago and they are curling up their leaves. Big surprise there.

Dawn

I have no other way than to accept the heat index figure that comes to my desktop from the Grove airport about 5 miles from my house. It is almost 7 PM, the temp is 95 degrees, humidity is 71, dew point is 84 and the HEAT INDEX IS 124. I don't write 'em, just report 'em.

Carol,

The Grove Airport's number is always so much higher than the ones from the National Weather Service or the OK Mesonet. It always confuses me when I see abnormally high HIs that don't correlate to the ones from government agencies but I think y'all just have a really, really humid pocket of air there around the lake and your heat index really is that high even if no one else's is.

On our Channel 12 evening news, Steve LaNore reported the HI at Paul's Valley as 116, and I've never particularly thought of Paul's Valley as a real humid place. Today, though, they clearly were.

We're always so hot and dry here, as opposed to hot and humid, that our heat index rarely exceeds 105. Today it reached at least 107 and you could feel it. I can't even imagine what 115 or 120 or 125 would feel like.

Your dewpoint, by the way, is utterly ridiculous. I've never seen ours go higher than 78, and I've only seen that once or twice. For us, a dewpoint of 77 is exceptionally high. A dewpoint in the 80s is unimaginably high....and is exactly the type of dewpoints often seen in hot and humid Florida....so you have their humdity and heat index, but without the sunny beach, the ocean, the seashells or the citrus fruit. : ) If 84 is not a record dewpoint for y'all, I don't want to know what your record highest dewpoint ever would have been. The 84 is just completely mind-boggling.

I linked the NOAA Heat Index Calculator. You can plug in your numbers and see what NOAA says your HI is. I'm going to do it tomorrow and see if my OK Mesonet Heat Index is the same as NOAA's would calculate with the same numbers. Since your airport is calculating the heat index, I cannot imagine they are not using NOAA's formula, so you have to believe their numbers. Airports normally give very reliable weather data because it is so important for the flight crews.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: NOAA's Heat Index Calculator

Dawn, Thanks for the link and I find it very interesting. I took the 8 PM figures and plugged them into both charts and the airport is reporting the exact heat index as the 'Using Dew Point Temperature' chart. If I used it on the relative humidity chart, the chart records 2 dgreees higher.

The other night during the storm, MESONET finally moved up to about a third of an inch of rain and we were getting pounded here. Ottawa County, just north of me, was reporting over 2 inches at the time. I would say that I was somewhere in between. But...sometimes that first frost or freeze comes for others and doesn't come to those of us who live near the water.

I know that there is quiet a varience of temp from one part of the county to the other, but sometimes I wonder if our MESONET is ever right.

How does it feel? HOT! When you walk outside your glasses fog up as soon as you step out the door. Your clothes feel wet in about 3 minutes. I moved here in 2001, and have never felt a summer like this one.

Nope, not kidding. The a/c starting sounding like a machine gun this morning so I shut it off, thinking the rest would do it good. This afternoon, I hit the power button again, walked over here to sit for a minute and opened up this thread. The a/c made a tremendous clunk sound and died. Phhbbtt.

It was cooler outside than in the house for most of the day so we did a bunch of work out there today, weeding and other assorted chores.

Diane

Carol,

There are entire months when our temps or rainfall aren't even close to those at Burneyville, and there are times they are almost exactly the same. The NWS Co-operative Weather Observer lives 2 miles from us and it is the same thing...our numbers sometimes match and sometimes don't. Often our temps and heat index are closer to Gainesville's than to Burneyville's. I just try to keep an eye on our data here and figure it is 'close enough'. With rainfall, I kept written records for several years, and even if there was wild variation between us and Burneyville throughout the year, by the end of the year we always had numbers close to theirs for the year's total rainfall.

Diane, That's terrible news about the AC. It seems like they always go out just when you need them most. I hope y'all can stay cool.

Dawn

I was outside on blacktop in the sun, but under a canopy today from 2:30 to 6:00. It was the worst I have ever experienced, but likley due to the heat in the blacktop radiating up at me because, even though I had a canopy up, the blacktop was in full sun up until I got there (and we all know what a lot of blacktop in the sun will do to the air temp even after the sun goes down).

It was truly the worst I have ever been in. (Even worse than walking an 18-hole golf course carrying golf clubs in full sun in the stinking Metroplex at 5:00 in the afternoon in late July.) I drank 96 ounces of tea, 16 ounces of Dr Pepper, 16 ounces of caffeine-free coke, 109 ounces of poweraide, and 32 ounces of water during a 5 hour period. I still haven't pee'd during this time or since! (OK, I pee'd once a while ago.) There were puddles on the ground under where my elbows were during that time while I was standing!

Absolutely brutal, and the temp was not even 100. Maybe I am just getting old.

Scot, If you drank all of that those elbow puddles weren't sweat, you were just full and running over, like a spout on the teapot. You must have been hot.