First night , tropical paradise

It was California summer when I arrived in Bangkok, the Thai Airways flight gets in late and when I stepped out into the Asian night I expected a blast of tropical heat and was a little disappointed, it was cool and cloudy and I couldn't figure what the big fuss was about, Jack paying me to come over here to save him and his marriage from the dreaded climate. In fact it seemed a lot nicer than my place inHollywood, my little apartment on the top floor of an old LA style wood apartment that heated up like an oven in the middle of the afternoon with the sun blasting down on the tar roof, it was miserable well into the evening when the coastal fog finally moved in. West Coast marine, they called that climate, I remembered that from my junior high geography class.

He and Dah couldn't meet me, they had to go to a funeral in her village but they set me up with a room in this middlebrow hotel, the Taipan, on Soi 23 in this lively neighborhood. Everyone seemed pretty nice at the desk, the girls smiling all the time, Even with some old geezers walking in to the hotel with some surprising looking ladiies. I started walking around the streets around midnight and these girls sitting at bars said Welcome and I saw these massage places where they actually publically advertised on big signs with flashing lights that teen girls would rub your testicles with gel, I couldn't quite believe that, but a guy in a place called the Ship Inn told me that the place was full of Japanese and they went for that kind of thing.

Back at the hotel I couldn't sleep for the jet lag and I started to fool around with some ideas, why my Hollywood place got so hot and so forth, and where I was now in the big picture, down at latitude 13 instead of up around 40 or so in California.

I had found it almost impossible to meet women in Hollywood, no one was interested in a broken down MIT guy there. This seemed like a different world. I fell asleep thinking of Boston Hollywood Bangkok, Boston Hollywood Bangkok. I has a dream of the Puritan days back in Boston, where they hanged a woman, Anne Dyer was her name, because she talked too much about the Quaker religion.

Bangkok looked like a different kind of venue, I wondered what the Puritans would think of this place.

Greasy black dust

Saturday morning inspection

Greasy black dust.

What is the catalogue number for this annoyance in Bangkok's registry of invasions, threats and assorted hazards? All those things that are going to make it impossble to live in an old wood Thai house?

No question, after a few weeks of neglect there is a black film on everything.

But lets not get hysterical here! Jack pops open a Singh, lights a cigar, and meditates on World War Two years in Boston, USA, when he used to visit his grandmothers old house in the city. Wasn't everything covered with soot, including the snow? They burned coal. Not an unpleasant smell (it comes back to Jack when he has another beer and concentrates on it).

But dirty nonetheless.

Herald Tribune has an article about pollution in Asian cities.



Better Bangkok than Beijing

Wait a minute, Bangkok doesn't look so bad! Not any worse than LA or Chicago.

For more on Bangkok air:
http://www.aqnis.pcd.go.th/news/health_effects.html

Coldest day in bangkok, 2007?

Up this morning at dawn, one of the coldest days of the year here in Bangkok, no fan last night and a quilty cover needed for warmth. How luxurious to be cold! At 5:48 it's two minutes before nautical twilight and the first prayer cries form the mosque half a mile away float scratchily through the dawn air and are picked up by a not unpleasing wave of dog howlings. One of these mornings I must make a catalog of "dawn sounds from Bangkok", add them to this blog. I make a few myself, throwing latches and carefully working my way out on to the deck so I don't stumble on the many levels we've built into this house, then climbing shakily up on a chair to measure the roof temperature.

One of the first steps in engineering a solution to Bangkok's heat problem is to make an inventory of possible heat sinks, cool places to which unwanted heat might be transferred. For example: practitioners of alternative thermal climate control in temperate regions of the world usually think of a presumably cooler underground where the temperature is likely to hover at somewhere near the mean annual temperature in that region. For example, a considerable quantity of 98 degree air can be cooled to a pleasant 75 degrees if a source of 60 degree heat sink is conveniently available. A cubic meter of earth at a depth of three meters , where the ground temperature will be, in say northern Europe, about 15C (60F), will pull the required 22 degrees of summer heat from a houseful of august air. Alas at the latitude of Bangkok, with a mean annual temperature of about 28, relatively cold earth is not found at any depth; in fact, the earth begins to warm to about 30 degrees fifty meters down. (In fact a recent analysis of subsurface temperatures beneath BKK indicate a 1.7 C increase in earth temperatures during the past fifty years in the inner city due apparently to urban heat island effects, over and above global warming effects). Annual variation in subsurface temperature at a depth of 3 meters is only one degree or so.

So we can forget about earth cooling, we've got to find some other cool place.













Here is my measuring instrument, about fifty bucks form Radio Shack.

You can see here that the roof temperature which I took yesterday in a test run is 20 degrees, the sky temperature -2 degrees.






But this morning I measure as follows:


Roof temperature: 16 degrees C
Air temperature: 20 degrees C

But how can this be? This is the same question I used to ask myself about the frost on the pumpkin. How can the frosty pumpkin be colder than the air, which is above freezing temperature?

Here is he answer: when I turn the thermometer upward to the sky the temperature reads -7 degrees.

Sky temperature: -7 deg C!!!

In other words, here at latitude 13 the sky is seven degrees below zero, more or less the same temperature of the air today in Wisconsin where

The bitter frostes, with the sleet and reyn,
Destroyed hath the grene in every yerd;

So the sky is very cold, even here in tropical Bangkok, and this -- in spite of the warmth of the air-- is sucking heat out of the roof to the extent that the temperature is supressed 4 degrees below air temperature. Can I use this to my advantage when the dreaded hot season arrives three months from now?

A long way from home

I grew up in New England.

The summers, especially the "Dog Days of August" were sultry; the fall was crisp and delicious, and then the "frost was on the pumpkin" and the rains came and then the howling "Nor' Easter" storms that closed all schools, we heard the good news on the radio in the morning. Serious businessmen like my father trekked through the drifts to work anyway, never missed a day.

Boston as always thought the best of itself and everyone said that the vigorating seasons were what made people alert and industrious, compared, for example, to Mexico, where everyone slept away the day, and Havana, God knows what they did down there. But then you'd think about that, whatever they did do down there, maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all, the warm wind on the Malecon and the bar lights twinkling and one night when I finally went there to see what was going on I went into one the bars and there was a juke box playing Nat King Cole and a couple of girls sitting at the bar and...well that's another story. The funny thing is, my father, the serious businessman, once had a Cuban girlfriend. But this was the tropics, people ran away to places like that, it was hot and sticky and sweating far into the night, the weather just did things to you. Made you irresponsible.

But getting back to Boston, as soon as the days that my mother called the "dog days of August" were over, bright and sparkling September came along and I walked to school kicking the yellow and orange maple leaves. I loved that weather, the smell of those leaves burning in the fall. Halloween was just around the corner, and then soon enough the "frost would be on the pumpkin."

But all of that was half century ago at latitude 42, and aside from my nightly film festival of dreams of those sparkling times and those Kodachrome neighborhoods, my days now, and probably all my future days, will be at a very different latitude, latitude 13. Think Djibouti, or Cape Verde, or the Marshall Islands, or who knows where in Africa.




Now I live a long way from home.

Think heat.

Think humidity.

Or think Bangkok, Thailand, where I am writing this entry, waiting for the sun to go down, then I'm going out into this traffic you see here, and do some things I'll discuss later in this blog.

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Last year the makers of "Old Spice" deodorant for men published the results of a study of the "sweat rankings" of American cities. The winner was Phoenix Arizona but Texas cities like Dallas and Houston and several Florida cities were right up there and since I've always had a bad memory of Houston I'm going to use that place as a kind of bench mark, to compare Boston and Bangkok.




Take a look at the "march of temperature" through the seasons in three cities: Boston, which had a famous heat wave the first few days in August, 2006 (pink circle), a hundred thirty six people died including one woman sitting inthe bleachers at Fenway Park; Houston, which as I said seemed to me to be really awful, and Bangkok, awfuller yet. The red points are the highest temperature of the day, the green the highest dew point temperature of the day (more on that later). When the temperture is more than 30, you will begin to sweat, even if you are just sitting looking at this blog.

As you can see, that's most afternoons in Bangkok (the daily high is usually at about three o'clock).

You might say that Boston heat wave got up as high as Bangkok, but even thoughthey were passing out cold water on the half deserted Boston streets you could still sweat pretty effectively there because the dew point temperature was low, down around 24. In Bangkok, in contrast, the dew point hardly gets below 26 most of the year, so all that sweat just soaks your shirt and hardly cools a body at all.

Black hole

The "Black Hole" mosquito trap that attracted so much of Dah's mirth ("What you pay for that thing?") turned out to be a fine thing after all.



Jack's morning job was to empty the trap, which had hummed away the night on the floor of the bedroom. He was very Buddhist about it, sealing and placing the trap outside on the deck. Many of the mosquitos seemed to expire or go to sleep on the floor of the trap, with their feet sticking up. The several selected by destiny or will continued to fly around the trap batting themselves against the screen walls. When the number of "actives" had fallen to a countable number Jack opened the trap. The actives flew away (Dah suspected back to the bedroom) and the rest Jack dumped onto the deck for a count (some of these had been bluffing and flew away too.)

Jack made a graph of the count, combined with some weather data.




Question: What is the cause of the dramatic increase in January?