Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
is that 49 wet bulb or 49 normal?
I guess not as wet bulb 35 already kills humans
it kind of sucks living in a part of the world that requires you to sit in air conditioned bubbles all day. it’s a fucking depressing way to live.
Damn, everything above body heat (37°C) is bad for your body.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C
There are not enough swear words in my vocabulary to successfully articulate my reaction to that.
40c is 104F, it’s not common but it happens where I live at least a few times a summer.
49c is 120F that wouldnt be fun
My state high happened near where I live in 1934. 118 degrees.
Personally I think the highest I’ve experienced is 112.
Can tell you’re not an Aussie, seen 47/116 quite a few times
The line I was reacting to stated an overnight low of 95. It was 104 by 9:30am. We’ve had stretches where it didn’t dip below 85 (cycle of nightly cloud cover basically acting as a wet blanket) and it was absolutely miserable. A low of 95 is nightmare territory.
I live in corn country. At night and morning the corn swets, and makes the humidity skyrocket can easily make night stay in the high 80s low 90s sometimes
That is nice for those who have been accused of having room temperature IQs in freedom units though.
104 is not terrible as long as you drink water can be in the shade every now and then it’s doable depending on humidity
Once temps hit more than 37C and 100% humidity, the human body loses the ability to regulate it’s temperature through sweating.
1-100 Celsius is about water freezing —> boiling and I’ve always been confused about why it’s so eminently logical to understand the weather by that scale.
1-100 Fahrenheit, meanwhile, is a really reasonable approximation of the habitable range of temperatures.
And you just showed this by having to establish for everyone that the upper bound of habitability is 37C. A completely random number anyone would forget.
No one “forgets” temperatures dude, 17°C might be meaningless to you but to me it’s just shirt and light jacket weather. Nobody forgets what the body temperature in Celsius is. It’s two digits, your brain can do it.
Fahrenheit simply puts the human at the center where physical phenomena like water freezing and boiling happen at “random” points on its scale, while Celsius takes two simple, constant (as long as you’re not on a mountain), verifiable points based on physics, where the temperature of a human body falls on a “random” place on it.
The point is very simple: if you have an unlabeled thermometer and need to calibrate it, you stick it in freezing water, mark 0, stick it in boiling water, mark 100, divide into equal segments, and it will be exactly right. If you want to do the same for Fahrenheit, you need another reference thermometer. (Unless you happen to have the same unspecified mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride that Fahrenheit supposedly originally used to mark the 0 point)
I am sorry, but you are wrong, however you are not wrong at what you might expect me to call you out on.
There is nothing inherently superior with F for “habitable” temps, both C and F works fine for that, for me who is used to C, talking about body temps of 37 makes sense to me, for me 98.6 seems completely wrong.
It all boils down to what we are used to.
It’s funny how it’s supposed to be great to measure “human temperatures”, yet 98.6 is normal and 100 is a fever.
I’d much rather know if I should expect ice or wet pavement outside than whatever 1 degree F is. What’s the difference to me, functionally, between 0 and 1 degrees F?
And 100 degrees F could be a nice day or an absolute hell depending on humidity. So it’s still not useful.
You just think it makes more sense because it’s what you are used to.
Fahrenheit wanted repeatable, laboratory-friendly reference points, not abstract physics.
These were the anchor points:
- 0 °F brine ice: A mixture of ice + water + salt settles at a repeatable equilibrium temperature.
- 96 °F human body: The temperature of the human body.
They could have chosen 100 °F for the human body, but then the math works out oddly for other common calculations (e.g., the freezing point of water is ~33.33). They went with 96 because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, and 4 (perfect for halving, quartering, and thirding with 18th-century tools). This placed the freezing point of water at exactly 1/3 the way up to the top anchor of 96.
It’s a system designed for convenience with ancient tools and ways-of-life. The boiling point of water wasn’t used because it was too difficult to reliably reproduce at the time.
What stands out here is that this does not necessarily model after some kind of “habitability zone.” Such a zone is only prescribed post-hoc, with the conventional understanding of Fahrenheit -> comfortability conveniently engrained in your intuitive reflex already.
The truth is, habitability changes based on factors like humidity too. I’ve experienced 120F that wasn’t so bad, dare I say it was a “nice toasty summer.” In contrast, I’ve experienced 75F with very high humidity and I wanted to die.
Boiling water hard to reliably reproduce? What?
Yup. Wet-bulb conditions are no joke and can kill, making functioning A/C a life-saving technology if not an outright requirement for survival.
I’ve worked in mines in the desert in South Australia where temps semi regularly hit 46-47 degrees.
It’s OK (ish) because the humidity is low. But you can drink a litre an hour all day (11+ hours) and not need to pee. All that water goes somewhere.
The underground workings are often more dangerous, with lower temperatures but higher humidity. Once wet bulb temps get above 34 degrees underground personnel need to retreat from the area and the only work that can be done there then is work to fix the ventilation.
There’s heat stress meters that measure wet and dry bulb temperatures and airflow, and can basically compute cooling power in watts. Not enough cooling power -> everyone out.
I can only imagine, as I sit on the Stockholm metro with cold and damp feet after walking through snow and some slush to get to the bus earlier.
I am happy to hear that you have rules and regulations for these eventualities.
Yeah, in those conditions, you live and die by wet bulb temperatures.
Actually at 100% humidity the highest survivable temperature for a human is 35 C° wet bulb temperature.
But that is with everything else being perfect, being healthy, in the shade, and perfectly hydrated, and zero physical activity.
A more realistic maximum survivable wet bulb temperature is closer to 30 C°. But 35 C° is the absolute maximum, where above that everybody dies.Sorry, but that’s wrong. WBGT takes radiative heat into effect when it’s calculated. The sun and shade effectively have two different WBGT readings. That’s why its measured with a black globe. Protocol is to measure ~2 meters heigh in direct sunlight away from structures that block wind so you get the worse case scenario. Like any whether reading, its localized.
It’s dry as a bone here right now. (That’s good)
Also means it’s all a big tinderbox. (That’s bad)
It makes evaporative air conditioners work better (That’s good)
Isn’t this called wet bulb or something and lethal?
That was it, yes!
I lived in Perth for several years and I’ve seen 45 degree heat there. It’s a desert, so it’s dry heat. But that’s hot. Real hot. 49-50 is just insane.
I live in Italy, in the valley around our biggest river. It’s humid as fuck. Summers used to reach 32-35°C. Nowadays 40-45°C is not uncommon. Our offices are usually air-conditioned, but production areas aren’t.
I worked in Saudi Arabia for several years. According to the law, people working outdoors can have a break when it gets over 50. Usually, that law was actually obeyed. Hottest I ever experienced was 52. You don’t have to out in that for long in order for it to be lethal, even if, as in my case, I was running every day in the desert and somewhat acclimatized to it. I’d go at 6 AM because that’s the only time it wasn’t infernally hot. The Bedouins, who know a thing or two about surviving the local climate, would get under cover and minimize activity when it got that hot.
Now I live in southwestern England, where it seldom gets above 30. I’m fine with that.
Oh it’s nice you get a break when it hits 50. How long of a break?
Seriously the fact that we are adults and don’t just say fuck off it’s to hot and call it a day or at the very least go cool off for a hour is insane
In Texas the hottest day I remember was 46 and that was miserable.
yeah, it was damn near 100% humidity the 46 day i was there. i was moving, too. fucking sucked but i had the joy of knowing it was my last day in texas.
i have no idea how much water i went through, but we moved a tiny studio successfully.
That’s pretty damn hot. Around 120 F for those imperialists among us.
good soldiers follow fahrenheit
Dangerously hot, those are “fall and the sidewalk can burn you” temperatures.
It’s not that we’re not imperial, it’s just that we use very logical measuring units.
Speaking as an American mechanical engineer who had to learn both systems… Do we? Do we really? Is multiplying everything by 10 not logical enough for you?
Metric is superior for conversions.
Imperial’s basis on body parts makes for highly intuitive human-scale measurements.
I don’t spend all my time converting measurements, I guess. The 10x jump in increments sometimes leaves big gaps in usability. Centimeter level precision isn’t enough for carpentry. But I can’t read my ruler with milimeter precision unless I get out my glasses and turn all the lights on. 1/8ths of an inch are precise enough and easy to see. 🤷♂️
I assume they meant aussies. You know, the country that the article is about, that uses metric, and that celebrated their genocide day yesterday
Pretty sure they were saying where they are, outside of the US, is also imperial but uses more logical units of measure (i.e. metric). Double-negative and all that.
42-ish here in Belgrave. Current status: finished work, drinking a cold cider, then off to the pool.
Alcohol and coffee being among the drinks to avoid once we get to wet bulb territory.
Then why do Piña Colladas taste so great in hot weather?
Checkmate Atheists
Oh, yeah. Currently low humidity, though.
If he’s in Belgrade, good luck getting him to give up nescafe and rakia.
It was ‘fun’ at work. We don’t have air con, just big sheds - plenty of ventilation though, it’s not still and not in the sun.
It’s workable, you’ve absolutely got to keep up with hydration, stop for a drink every ~10-15mins, keep the fan on you.
Double Wall 1L+ drink bottle is required, filled half with ice cubes to keep the water frosty.
Can’t imagine how bad it’d be if it was humid.
Wow, my tropical country often gone to 34/35°c high humid in hot days, can’t imaging anything higher than that.
Arizona gets hotter than that. Wimps.
(But seriously that’s really fucking hot)
i always found all those pathetic arizonans rather amusing. they like to go on and on about how much worse their heat is than anyone else’s, but i’ve done 116 in 100% humidity in texas and 120 with 0% humidity in phoenix. you could barely move in the heat in texas, but if you had to work in it you could get used to it. compared to that phoenix’s heat wave was completely unnoticeable.
but y’know, you always have to have something to hang your identity on, so go whine about everything being hotter in arizona or something.
Pshh, that’s a dry heat. Try that heat with humidity so thick you sleep in a warm puddle because the night offers no relief while feeling like the air is drowning you
I think south asia in may gets like that.
But hottest temps actually happen around 30 degrees lattitude, in season, idk what aussies are at, near there I think.
India has a weird climate though with the entire north snd east blocked by the roof of the world, so all air comes from indian ocean and south and west, backing up on mountains, and makes it super humid and just static. Same reason pollution is so bad, it just sits there instead of being pushed west with the wind.
Long story short, the hot humid thereabouts is perhaps more dangerous, especially with the air pollution mixed in.
India has a weird climate though with the entire north snd east blocked by the roof of the world, so all air comes from indian ocean and south and west, backing up on mountains, and makes it super humid and just static.
Nah. Coastal regions are humid. Inland regions, North and Central India, are dry.
That is what I was told. By an Indian. He did not mention the center though.
But the middle of landmasses are often humid, the us south, the midwest.
The west coast has mountain range called Sahyadri running parallel.
It creates an effect called rain shadow where the coastal side is humid but the other side is dry.
