Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Tropical Cool: How was it for you?

Well for me it wasn't too bad, , the first part of the year, I think I'm getting used to the heat and humidity a little. But they say that this year is going to be a bad one. The question is, how much worse is it going to get?

I took the worst year I could find, the big El Nino year of 1983, when the Pacific practically started boiling. (You saw that sequence of years in my last posting, years 1982-1985). Then I superimposed the daily high temperature and dew point for the Asoke station* right down the road from where I am now writing this. The 83 data are in white, the 2007 data, right up to this morning, are in red and green.


What you can see here is how it began to warm up in January, then took a refreshing little dive in the beginning of February, now it's back on track again, with even the Thai beginning to comment a little on how hot it is, and now it's heading for the big peak usually around mid to late April or even May. The graph suggests it may be a little cooler than 1983, but the 83 data are from Don Muang, not downtown, it may be a little hotter up there with all those hot (but uncracked) taxiways. But the dew point -- I will argue later that dew point is probably a better all-round indicator of thermal discomfort -- looks about the same this year as 83.

AND, by the way, the weather the last few days has been almost exactly the same as the weather in Boston, last year in July, (2006), the dreaded heat wave of '06 (see my first posting), when the streets were deserted and water was being passed out and they made one hundered fifty thousand phone calls to warn people that it was hot!

Stay tuned!

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