Something new under the sun

Looks like folks back in the northern hemisphere are having a hellish winter at the moment and I guess we really shouldn't complain about the NZ summer, especially considering what's going on across the ditch (as they say here) with high summer and countless bushfires pushing temperatures up into the forties. Victoria is a real horror story right now, enough to make you want to spend the rest of your life on a freezing Hebridean island: nearly 200 dead and loads more injured, upwards of a thousand homes destroyed, half a million hectares reduced to fields of charcoal. We could have boiled our heads and still have been relatively well-off. At times though, boiled – or maybe steamed – is pretty much how your head feels in Auckland... I thought I'd lived in some hot places but this week's been an eye-opener.

When I checked the forecast last weekend it looked good – maximum 25 degrees, light nor'westerlies, dropping to 20 overnight... nice eh? Er, No. Not nice at all, in fact bloody awful, with humidity turning out to be more than "a bit on the high side" and actually reaching 100%. If you've never experienced 100% humidity, imagine going out on a hot summer's day wearing a black polythene bin liner, with just your head poking out the top (this is one of those drawstring bags, right, with the white cords tied in a nice bow at the neck, like you might be going somewhere posh for dinner. Only not, cos you'd wear, like, a nice dress or whatever, but you get the idea) then, just as it's getting good and sweaty in there, you take a deep breath through the tiny holes thoughtfully punched out of the bottom of the carrier bag you have over your head. You can breathe, but it's as if you've swapped your lungs for gills. Terminal humidity feels a bit like that, but without the public ridicule and sudden weight loss.

Tuesday was just insufferably hot, even though it was only 28º... I had to find out why. I was sweating so much I thought I would short out the keyboard, but I eventually Googled something called a heat index, which is (appropriately enough) sort of the opposite of your English wind chill factor; a way of expressing how hot it feels at a given level of humidity. It's really interesting, but if thermodynamics isn't your cuppa, you could skip this bit:

The higher the water content of the air (ie relative humidity), the hotter it seems to be to us humanoids, because we rely on the air to carry away our perspiration and thereby cool us down. Max out the relative humidity and no more water can enter the air, sweat will not be carried off, flapping your arms up and down like a pantomime seagull has no effect whatsoever, and it feels oppressively hot even when it isn't.

Geddit? No? Ok, look under the kitchen sink, you'll find some black bin liners... or, using a handy online heat index calculator, dial in 100% humidity and discover that 28ºC translates into a "feels like" temperature of 37ºC and when "normal" temperatures get up to 30º (as they surely will) our solidarity with the Aussies' 40+ will have been achieved, or at least it'll feel like it has...

I kind of remember some occasional very humid days in Spain but I'm sure it was never this oppressive. Apparently the Middle East is the worst, getting up to heat-stroke-inducing HIs of 55 and beyond. A few years back the Canadians, inventors of the wind chill factor, set up heat index thing called the humidex to give their citizens a meaningful forecast of the day's "feels like" temperatures. They also worked out that a humidex factor of 40 is enough to cause "great discomfort". I tell you what, they're not wrong either. Wednesday was almost unbearable. Going outside for some air was exactly like walking into a small bathroom after someone's had a really hot shower. No wind, no air, just a strength-sapping outdoor sauna. Eventually, as night drew in and the air cooled a little it started to, well, not rain as such, more break out into a wispy, directionless vapour, drifting about rather than falling, as if the air itself had broken into a sweat.

Niki spent the whole week trying to get cold, which will sound as bizarre to her friends up north as I'm sure it will to herself, come July. I know I keep harping on about it and I'm sure It'll all seem quite normal after a couple of years here, but it is a very odd thing to be feeling in February. Even Elly remembers seeing out our last winter in wind-battered Chester-le-Street, with the cold howling up the high street and straight through several layers of clothing. Tomorrow it'll be one year exactly since we moved there from Spain, steeled against it all, full of hope that we'd end up somewhere warmer before the year was out. Put like that, we really can't complain at all.

I just realised I've been moaning on about the weather so much I forgot to upload those pics. I'll get it done this weekend, somewhere between the beach and the barbie, I guess :)