Yikes! It’s been hot here too, I’m looking forward to it cooling down next week.
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I went to the 2003 walnut growers meeting which was held in Columbia Missouri. We were outdoors at the pecan experiment station with Bill Reid and he asked us to give our names and a few things about ourselves. It was 107 degrees in the shade but typical Kansas dry heat which is not as bad as humid heat. So when it was my turn, i said “My name is Darrel Jones from Alabama and I came up here to enjoy ya’lls nice cool weather”. Some thought I was being funny, but it really was a bit of a relief from the hot humid 105F in Alabama at that time.
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Yeah, the thermometer said 106°f here earlier today with a heat index of 100°f. It didn’t feet that bad (as long as you didn’t sit in one spot) to me even though I was working outside all day, and there wasn’t a lick of wind, but there also was no humidity. Earlier this year the heat index got up to 115°f.
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Humid 80 F is worse than dry 100 F, I’m quite convinced.
I remember one time I was in New Mexico and being impressed by how nice it was outside and how I felt like I could do outdoor recreation all day and barely break a sweat. I was floored when I learned it was in the mid 90s…
In NC, that’s hot enough to kill you if you’re not careful. The humidity makes it so much harder to stay cool.
But on the flip side, citrus prefer the humidity. Dry air means water stress, leaf curling, and spider mites! Not so good.
It’ll definitely help. The growing season y’all have is shorter and the shoulders aren’t as warm as in NC, but it’s reasonably close which is good. I’ve seen reports from folks in the PNW and Europe growing Dunstan who find it pretty nasty tasting and not very hardy. Definitely need long hot summers for grapefruit hybrids.
Funny enough, while your summer daily highs are much hotter than ours, our summer nightly lows are warmer. It’s the humidity at with for both. During the day, that water absorbs crazy amounts of heat. At peak humidity, it’s almost impossible for temperatures to get much above the mid 90s because there’s just so much water in the air there isn’t enough solar energy to heat it all. Miami Florida has never in history seen a temperature above 99 F, and Belém and Manaus, two cities in the literal Amazon rainforest, have only cracked 100 F once in history, and have never seen 101 F. London has seen hotter days than the Amazon…
And at night, all that heat gets released, keeping nightly lows warmer. That’s good for Madagascar spinach and citrus and other heat lovers, but it’s brutal on tomatoes, clove currants, peppers, and lots of other plants that need cooler nighttime lows for proper respiration.
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