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Hottest Rain on Record: Rain Falls at 119°F in Imperial, California
- WalterBright 8y agoMing the Merciless must be at it again. The last time he tried hot hail was in 1980.
- shmerl 8y agoThat's 48.3°C for those who prefer the metric system. Weather reporting is one of the cases still quite stuck with imperial one.
- wadkar 8y ago48!?!? That’s insane. I wonder how that would impact the plants and other life
- hourislate 8y agoWhen I lived in Canada everyone in the building industry used Imperial.
- shmerl 8y agoAt least Canada uses kilometers and kilometers per hour on the road signs. US is still stuck with miles.
- greesil 8y agoKilometers per hour is still not SI, meters per second are. Celsius?We should all be using Kelvins. Failing that, electron volts. The whole world is mad.
- shmerl 8y agoThey are not SI base measurements, but they are clearly metric. Kelvin is quite impractical for common ranges, unless you like to operate with huge numbers all the time.
- gcb0 8y agothe km/h vs m/s argument is close to pedantic, as this is just a convenient scale of SI. but you're right on Kelvins.
- yellowapple 8y agoFahrenheit makes sense for weather. 0° is really cold and 100° is really hot; most weather-related temperatures will fall within that range. 50° is chilly but manageable. 75° is almost in the sweet spot, while 25° is cold but not ridiculously so. Compare with Celsius, where 0° is pretty cold and 100° is painful death (and also unprecedented as far as meterology goes). Even 50° is absurdly hot. I'm all for using Metric units everywhere else, but they ain't exactly intuitive for weather reports.
- simonbarker87 8y agoIt entirely depends on what you have been raised on, the only reason there is no inherent reason with either scale as the why you consider 75 as the sweet spot but for me 20 is the sweet spot. Also, to say that it’s better because 0-100 is the range of most weather doesn’t make it better, most weather also falls in the range of 0-30degC.
- scarejunba 8y agoHonest to God, mate, you're just comfortable using your system. That's fine, to be honest, but all this is invented justification. The intuitiveness of these units is overrated.
- ubernostrum 8y agoI will stand up for Fahrenheit as originally conceived, for the convenience it was intended to provide: easy calibration and marking of thermometers. As originally designed, the reference points -- a self-stabilizing brine mixture, and human body heat -- make it easy to set up a situation where the difference between any two adjacent already-marked points is a power of two, after which filling in the rest is just a matter of marking halfway points between previously-marked points. Unfortunately, that got ruined by a later reaction to Celsius; the Royal Society redefined in terms of freezing/boiling of water, fixed those at exactly 32F and 212F, and as a result the original second reference point was no longer exactly 96 (it became 98-ish).
- shmerl 8y agoIt's quite relative and I can easily make the same argument for Celsius. Freezing point has a major impact on weather conditions, so making it at 0°C makes a clear mark for negative (below freezing) and positive (above freezing) temperatures. 32°F on the other hand isn't as descriptive for such marker.
- jimnotgym 8y agoIn the UK the press like to sensationalise the weather by reporting hot conditions in Fahrenheit and cold ones in Celsius. The truth is the UK is temperate, and the weather is not so newsworthy. I can remember it being -12 one extreme winter, and it can touch 90 on exceptional summer days. What has been newsworthy this year has been the extreme long period of sunny hot weather. But since our press are infested with climate-change deniers that has less sensationalist coverage.
- orf 8y agoI have never seen the UK press use Fahrenheit, that would be highly unusual. Perhaps in some online publications designed to attract American audiences?
- incadenza 8y agoDeath Valley almost broke the highest recorded temperature ever.
- topmonk 8y agoI would think the Big Bang would probably hold the record for that...
- incadenza 8y agoClearly you’ve never camped in Death Valley...
- Digit-Al 8y agoPossibly, but no one was around to record that so it can't be the highest 'recorded' temperature ever.
- topmonk 8y agoI disagree. Whether we record a temperature on earth or estimate the temperature of the big bang, we are dealing with the same class of rules and laws, of physics, and performing the same basic task of coming to a conclusion about the some hidden property based on some other observable properties. The machines we make to measure temperature come from the same stuff as the universe does, so there isn't anything special with regard to reading a value from a machine vs. calculating a temperature based on the properties of the stars and galaxies in the universe. Therefore, regardless of when the temperature has occurred, or where it happened, we are still measuring it. And as long as it was written down, it has been recorded.
- cimmanom 8y agoOk, but by being pedantic you’re deliberately ignoring the obviously implied “on earth” of the original statement.
- deleted 8y ago
- boxcardavin 8y agoI wonder what this would have felt like since it would not stay humid for more than a few minutes after it stopped raining. Humidity of 100% above 90F feels like 130F+ so this must have been wild.
- icananswerthat 8y agoI can answer that. Ive worked in this region many times, in summer, with extreme humidity due to riparian veg and monsoonal weather. It feels like dying. At 120 with over 80% humdity walking more than a couple hundred meters induces nausea and tunnel vision. The lede is sort of misleading because extreme temps can coincide with rain all over the SW, especially in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. It’s not that weird. However, the imperial valley is definitely the worst for working conditions. Even in dry air, shadeless work is tough. Your feet can be burned through a boot sole because the surface temps are much higher than shade air temps. If windless, your sweat fails to cool you; too much wind and you cannot possibly drink enough water to be hydrated. It’s a tough place. Now try working in that and writing code in basic so your sensors resume coms to loggers.
- windowsworkstoo 8y agolol come to australia and harden up princess
- icananswerthat 8y agoI have actually. It’s not that bad.
- icananswerthat 8y agoBut bogans gotta bogan, i reckon.
- spacehome 8y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.
- blondie9x 8y agoWhen will we start sacrificing to prevent climate catastrophe? There isn't enough global concern. Especially in the US. Everything else aside no President should be able to deny reality.
- irrational 8y ago"We" can start right now. The general populace however is pretty much subsisting at a level where that question wouldn't even be considered for a millisecond.
- jsilence 8y ago70% of global farmland is used to produce fodder for beef. A significant share of strong greenhouse gas methane is produced by cattle. You can start today by sacrificing your finger lickin bbq beef eating habit.
- interfixus 8y agoIf by 'sacrificing' you mean voluntarily letting go of some materal assets, then not for a long, long time, and probably never. In the older, darker, and more fundamental sense of the word, I shudder to think that the way irrationality is growing, probably soon.
- themagician 8y agoWhen Manhattan or Miami get hit by two mega storms back to back in consecutive years. When the damage is such that we can’t rebuild fast enough then it will be a wake up call.
- ars 8y ago> When the damage is such that we can’t rebuild fast enough Never gonna happen. People are far far far more resilient and capable than that.
- themagician 8y ago
- _cerv 8y agoMonsoon season during a heat wave in SoCal. I doubt that this extreme was unprecedented, we were just lucky enough to have gear on the ground that recorded precip.
- ksec 8y agoOff topic Question. What is the story behind Celsius and Fahrenheit? What US continue to use F when the rest of the world is now on C?
- jacquesm 8y agoLarge enough to ignore a better option. If the US were a small country this would not be a problem. The same happens with voltages, what side of the road you drive on and the use of imperial for building materials as well as telco standards. Island nations and very large territories are the ones that exhibit these properties because they can. What is worse is that as soon as the US invades some territory they push their standards. The funny thing is that the military usually gets it right because they only care about two things: accuracy and efficiency, there is no consideration for costs to switch or legal hassles, they just choose what works best.
- pvg 8y agoThe US Military's adoption of metric units has a lot to do with NATO integration - it's not because the military decided metric was more accurate and efficient.
- gshrikant 8y agoNot sure about the accuracy of this (or even the original source) but interesting tidbit from what I've read was that driving on the left side of the road is a remnant of British colonial times which lives on in the modern Commonwealth nations (Australia, India etc.).
- beefsack 8y agoTo save a conversion, that's 48°C.
- kchhina 8y agoI have family/friends that visit often from Celsius using countries and every time the weather comes up, they ask me what xx F is in C. Tired of trying to answer them, I figured out a quick, ballpark conversion -- 50 deg F = 10 deg C For every 10 def F, there's roughly a 6 deg C change. So (approximately) 40 deg F = 4 deg C 60 deg F = 16 deg C etc. I find that it works reasonably well for frequent requests from said Celsius understanding visitors. *Edited for line breaks
- roryisok 8y agoTook me a while to figure that out until I remembered that our zeroes are not the same. -40 is the same in both though, as far as I recall
- cimmanom 8y agoThe easiest ballpark conversion I know is: F -> C: subtract 32, divide by 2. So 76F = 44/2 ~= 22C C -> F: multiply by 2, add 32. So 15C = 30+32 ~= 62F The factor of 2 isn’t precise (the actual ratio is closer to 5/9). But it only really diverges at hotter temps: so 95F is actually 35C, whereas this formula will give you 31.5C, which is more like 89F; but 50F will give you 9C (48F), when the correct value is 10C. For most weather purposes it’s close enough - at least to decide what to wear - and it’s easy for most people to calculate.
- CarolineW 8y agoVery close over human ranges: C = (F-30) / 2 F = 2 * C + 30 Exact conversions: C = (F-32) * 5 / 9 F = C / 5 * 9 + 32 Table: C F -40 -40 0 32 (Approx water freezing point) 10 50 20 68 ( ~ 70) ~21 70 30 86 37 98.6 (body temperature) 40 104 50 122 ... ... 100 212 (Approx water boiling point)