9/25/2023 0 Comments Seattle weather heat waveExcept, for three days here, there was no cool air. The same fans perched on an open windowsill can blow in the cool air after the sun goes down. Two strategically stationed box fans create a small tempest, swooshing the parched, artificial wind across the skin in multiple directions. The placement of fans becomes its own kind of science. Or, the only endurable variety, and it’s barely even that: air pushed around by a fan. Then, beginning on Saturday, June 26th, the region surpassed that figure for three straight days, breaking the all-time record on Sunday, June 27th, at a hundred and four degrees, and obliterating that new record a day later, at a hundred and eight.Īnd so, window blinds down, Seattle residents endured varieties of heat: the still, hot air that sits in the dark bedroom corner like an apparition the diffuse heat that strikes every part of the body and never lets up the penetrating heat that holds you by the throat. ![]() Seattle had clocked temperatures above a hundred degrees only three times in the history of recording temperatures here, which began in the late eighteen-hundreds. In the verdant, cloud-covered upper-left corner of the U.S., it’s not uncommon for temperatures to stay in the sixties through much of June or even July-or for Seattleites to feel completely robbed of summer altogether, the skies a slate gray seemingly all season long.Ī heat wave like the one tormenting the Northwest right now upends all that. because, until a few years ago, we rarely needed it. Here in Seattle, which hit a hundred and eight degrees on Monday night-the highest local temperature on record-and where a majority of residents don’t have air-conditioning, box fans are the only defense that most of us have. ![]() What I mean is a sort of personal thermodynamics-a study in the varieties of heat conspired against you, and how that heat can be tamed or not (mostly not) with a fan. Maybe not thermodynamics, exactly no physicist is going to applaud the lessons here. You can learn a lot about thermodynamics while sitting indoors without air-conditioning on a hundred-plus-degree day.
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