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When Heat Turns Deadly

abc.net.au

1–5 of 5 posts

Re: When Heat Turns Deadly

#3
That seems counter-intuitive to me that the lower humidity causes greater problems I suppose that with high humidity, sweating becomes useless, so the high temperature combined with low humidity highlights the limits of our ability to sweat.

Re: When Heat Turns Deadly

#4
The subtitle is more informative: Scientists testing deadly heat limits on humans show thresholds may be much lower than first thought

The use of the wet bulb temperature as a measure for human survivability doesn't work at low humidities.

Re: When Heat Turns Deadly

#5
It doesn't seem like the wet bulb model accounts for ratio of surface area and volume.

The instrument they use is the sling psychrometer, a long cylindrical tube [1]. If I had to hazard a guess, the ratio of surface area to volume is much higher for the bulb than it is a human.

Evaporative cooling is a function of surface area--more surface area => more cooling capacity. I'd be curious to see how accurate the model if the surface area to volume ratio were more human-scale.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/sling-psych...