How not to brace
What’s wrong with this picture?
Too easy. The story is about a heatwave. What do you do in a heatwave? Try to stay as cool as possible. What do you not do? Lie in the sun in a bathing suit.
Tip Jar
What’s wrong with this picture?
Too easy. The story is about a heatwave. What do you do in a heatwave? Try to stay as cool as possible. What do you not do? Lie in the sun in a bathing suit.
Heatwave? You notice that’s only 32c, or not quite 90f. And it’s for a single afternoon. I assure you that plenty of people find that a perfect temperature in which to head to the beach, and not just loony English people. The ocean might feel refreshing on such a day. That only seems terribly hot because summer in England normally means what? 68f and drizzly? How are the English supposed to go turn themselves bright pink when it’s 68 and drizzly?
Honestly, I find this charmingly amusing. Unbearable heat! Almost 90 degrees, by the seashore. How will we ever survive? For Queen and Country, pass the Jubbly. It probably even gets cool at night still. Yes, looking at the forecast, it’s 61f overnight Thursday, then a peak of 90, then back down to 63 Friday night as it returns to normal.
Surely a single afternoon hardly constitutes a heat wave? Heat ripple? Heat blip? Heat bubble? Call it a wave when it lasts a week without respite. Else what to call it when it gets really bad?
Papito,
As Lennon said, “if the sun don’t come you get a tan from standing in the English rain.”
Papito, I agree. Here in Nebraska, that temperature in the summer would not infrequently be welcome. We’ve had that temperature listed as a cold front in some summers. This summer, we got up to that hot in May. Fortunately, June has been slightly cooler (though it was over 90 yesterday) and rainy. But humid…
I suspect 32C is rounded. It could represent 88.7F to 90.3F.
I have vague memories of a heat wave being declared (wherever it was I was living when I heard this) when the temperature broke 90F for something like 3 or 4 consecutive days. More modern and sophisticated weather services seem to consider it a heat wave when the heat index (which combines heat and humidity) is above a certain value (different for daytime and nighttime) for 48 hours. Oh, and they seem to avoid the term “heat wave” very strictly, preferring things like “heat warning” and “heat watch”.
So, if they are expecting 32C temperatures for two days, that seems reasonable to me to call it a heat wave, colloquially, although I would not be inclined to do so unless the high temperatures persisted another couple of days. If it is just one day, that’s not a heat wave by any definition that I can see.
As for the beach, I tend not to like broiling in the hot sun, either, but a lot of people do seem to like sitting in partial or full shade near the water. I enjoy it, and I can tolerate full sun for very short periods, but the people in the picture look like they’re planning to stay there for quite a while, and that’s much too much for me. I used to like “tanning”, oh foolish, naive, youthful me of bygone days.
I think “stay as cool as possible” is overstating it; “avoid getting overly hot”, maybe? “As cool as possible” means sitting in a chair in the freezer at the supermarket, or setting your air conditioner thermostat really far down while you sit indoors in your hermetically sealed dwelling. (People who live with open windows have a very different view of the world from those of us who never open windows.) For me, safe behavior during a heat wave is to minimize time spent in places without air conditioning.
I was so preoccupied by the juxtaposition of the photo with the warning that I didn’t notice the hot but not HOTTTT temperature and short duration. After that 108 here last summer, surrounded by days only a degree or two less hot, 90 is…unpleasant but nothing to freak out at.
A heatwave is what we in Oz call it when the temperature is 40C or more for over a week. For us, that is a usual summer.
However, it differs according to where one lives – my NZ friends can anything under 14C too cold, and above 24C too hot.
It’s 18c in Rio de Janeiro now, and people are putting sweaters on their dogs.
Papito, I think it is simply called a ‘hot day’. Or in an Australian summer, simpler still: a ‘day’.
Yeah, I hate the heat, but even so just 2-3 days of that with cooler nights is just ‘hot’. My partner would call it ‘nice’. Admittedly I have met people from Invercargill who considered 24 C as intolerable, but then it’s rare to go above that in Invercargill. I’m sure there must be a bona fide definition of a heat wave kicking around Meteorological organisations somewhere.
But coming back to Ophelia’s point, the answer to surviving a heatwave is sure as hell not to lie out in the sun!
For the past few weeks they’ve be going on endlessly on television about how hot it is. Maybe in some parts of France — even in most parts — it has been unpleasantly hot, but here in Marseilles we’e been having normal June weather, and the temperature on our balcony has never been less than about 3° below what they’re telling us it is on the weather forecast. When we went to vote yesterday we met at least three people who commented how hot it was. Nonsense, it was normal June weather. At this moment (9.45 AM) it is 24° outside. It may get up to 28° this afternoon, but it certainly won’t reach 30°. More and more people around us are installing air conditioning, which is completely unnecessary for 50 weeks of the year in Marseilles, and no doubt these people do find it too hot to go outside. Otherwise I think they’re just mindless repeating what the television says.
British houses and other buildings are built for heat retention and air conditioning is almost non-existent. I’ve been in 32C in Britain and in Spain. I was sweating like a pig in London; there was no respite from the heat either indoors or out. Whereas Barcelona was very pleasant at that temperature, thanks to airy buildings, shaded streets, and iced tea with real lemons.
I was wrong. It reached 31° yesterday afternoon, but it was perfectly bearable, just as YoSaffBridge describes for Barcelona.