3 ms·
When Heat Turns Deadly
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoThat seems counter-intuitive to me that the lower humidity causes greater problems I suppose that with high humidity, sweating becomes useless, so the high temperature combined with low humidity highlights the limits of our ability to sweat.
- jerlam 2y agoThe subtitle is more informative: Scientists testing deadly heat limits on humans show thresholds may be much lower than first thought The use of the wet bulb temperature as a measure for human survivability doesn't work at low humidities.
- Infinity315 2y agoIt doesn't seem like the wet bulb model accounts for ratio of surface area and volume. The instrument they use is the sling psychrometer, a long cylindrical tube [1]. If I had to hazard a guess, the ratio of surface area to volume is much higher for the bulb than it is a human. Evaporative cooling is a function of surface area--more surface area => more cooling capacity. I'd be curious to see how accurate the model if the surface area to volume ratio were more human-scale. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/sling-psychrometer https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/sling-psych...