Old Spice

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.

Normal Year?

A couple of weeks ago a Thai lady said to me "The heat hasn't been bad this year, a couple of weeks in March or April, then the rains cooled things down and it hasn't been bad since."

This lady happened to be an experienced architect, and my sense of the year agreed with her comment, but as a "quant" I felt compelled to look at the data, so I loaded Don Muang daily highs (temp and dew point) and superimposed on the hottest year I've found, which happens to be 1983. To my surprise this suggested that 1983 wasn't really so bad after all, except that the hot season got a little prolonged (so it just kept getting hotter) and then finally broke with the rain which (if I am right in my thinking) came a little late. I also believe that 1983 was a bad flood year, so now I wonder wheher al these things are tied together.

Hatless in bangkok

It was getting into late July now and to my delight the weather had become tolerable and even pleasant. I had feared the sun and brought from California an excellent straw hat, designed and branded in Australia, made in China, and bought by me in a sporting goods store for five dollars and ninety eight cents. The shading and ventilative features of this hat were excellent, but it was more than a nuisance to carry, and I began to notice that I really needed it only a few minutes every day. I had, for one, found that I was not venturing abroad for vigorous midafternoon walks as I might in America, and even then the sun did not shine much of the day, the sky filled with rapidly changing clouds, now mild and oyster colored, now blackish and turbulent. Soon enough I left the hat somewhere, I think in a movie theatre in Siam Square where they occasionally showed films that met my discriminating tastes.

I determined to design a better hat, since all that I was able to find in the markets were intolerably hot except during those very occasional and fleeting moments of fierce overhead solar radiation, for the Bangkok sun since April and until August was almost directly overhead. Extreme portability and low value were the principal design criteria for my hat; I thought that a small napkin-like folded paper disposable might do the trick, but I grew weary of trying to find the right materials and one day stumbled in desperation on the expedient of cutting a sleeve from an old T-shirt and gluing the end opening with ordinary carpenters glue. This worked well, I eventually made half a dozen, and though it might be said to have created a somewhat odd appearance I reasoned that foreigners were universally taken by the natives to be both odd and correct. I have never noticed even when shooting my most darting looks at the locals passing on the streets the slightest hint of derision from anyone.

But were it not for the impractical bulkiness for city wear, the traditional Thai farm hat, or muak, is clearly the winner, allowing for full shade and full circulation of air on your sweaty head.

Waning Heat of Summer

To my delight, the temperature moderated over the summer because of the rains, not at all unpleasant, crackling thunderstorms that might appear at any time, dawn, mid-day, most often in the late afternoon, everyone scurrying for shelter where girls had plenty of time to give you a lookover, then the black clouds would open and the dazzle would come back.

I downloaded the daily high temps for the year so far(blue), superimposed them on a speciment year fro the past (red) and it became clear that thought the sun was still hovering around in the middle of the sky, the cooling bath of rains was causing the temp to drop over the summer months. For that matter, it appeared that if you hated heat, the time to avoid in Bangkok was March through June.