Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
Fahrenheit wanted repeatable, laboratory-friendly reference points, not abstract physics.
These were the anchor points:
They could have chosen 100 °F for the human body, but then the math works out oddly for other common calculations (e.g., the freezing point of water is ~33.33). They went with 96 because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, and 4 (perfect for halving, quartering, and thirding with 18th-century tools). This placed the freezing point of water at exactly 1/3 the way up to the top anchor of 96.
It’s a system designed for convenience with ancient tools and ways-of-life. The boiling point of water wasn’t used because it was too difficult to reliably reproduce at the time.
What stands out here is that this does not necessarily model after some kind of “habitability zone.” Such a zone is only prescribed post-hoc, with the conventional understanding of Fahrenheit -> comfortability conveniently engrained in your intuitive reflex already.
The truth is, habitability changes based on factors like humidity too. I’ve experienced 120F that wasn’t so bad, dare I say it was a “nice toasty summer.” In contrast, I’ve experienced 75F with very high humidity and I wanted to die.
I agree that Celsius’ definability and reference points are more sensible.
All I ever say on this is that F has its appeal in everyday usability terms, because of how nicely 0-100 encapsulates our comfort zone. Not that it’s designed that way, it just happens to work nicely.
And whenever I say this much, people (not you) begin screaming at me about how I need to live my life by water’s phases changes :/
Yeah. I see your point that it’s a good rule of thumb, given it should as the human body temperature sits so close to 100F and that’s upper bound used. I see your point.
Boiling water hard to reliably reproduce? What?
Boiling water is full of pockets of steam that may be higher than 100C, and will have cold spots too. It’s really not very easy at all to get any quantity of water to 100C stably and consistently throughout. Not easy enough to be a foundational reference, with the tools of a century or two ago. Boiling is also sensitive to altitude and pressure changes, and may be shifted slightly based on the mineral content of the water. It is in fact not dead simple.
I like the idea that it’s hard to boil water, but easy to find a person whose body temperature is exactly the same as the reference point.
As a temperature that could be consistently referenced with then-modern technology, yeah. You’d have to control a lot of factors to make sure it’s not any hotter than it necessarily needs to be.