Forget Florida. L.A. humidity is off the charts this summer. What's going on?
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Set us as preferred Southern California’s swampy summer is setting new records, with humidity levels creating conditions that feel more like Florida than the West Coast.Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.It’s made an intense summer of heat particularly miserable.This week saw new heat records set in some areas, but it’s the humidity that has many at their wits end.Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching 73 to 75 degrees on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
The metric measures the moisture content in the air.The Orlando International Airport, by comparison, recorded a dew point of 72 degrees Friday afternoon, although that was expected to rise to 75, said meteorologist Melissa Watson of the National Weather Service in Melbourne.Dew points above 65 degrees are considered to be muggy and somewhat uncomfortable, those above 70 feel very humid and uncomfortable, and those above 75 are oppressive, according to the Weather Service.Farther south in Imperial County, a weather station along the western shore of the Salton Sea recorded a dew point of 81 degrees Thursday afternoon, according to Gabriel Lojero, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Phoenix.That’s “probably one of the higher values” recorded there, but meteorologists don’t have a long period of registered climate data for that area so it’s hard to say, he added.
The National Weather Service does not typically keep records of dew points.The humidity ...