Well, it's the first day of Summer! The day when around noon, the sun, if it's shining, will be at the highest point it will reach above us during this year in the Northern Hemisphere, as starting tomorrow, it will appear to begin dropping back lower, just a tiny bit per day. 'Course, here the sun is always shining, and today it hit 113 degrees F.! How do we stand it? Our Swamp Cooler, using nothing more than water and air as materials, is blowing air through our house at 74 degrees, nearly a drop of 40 degrees from the outside 113-degree air, which it takes in from the outdoors, passes it through pads of shredded Aspen wood which are kept soaked with water, and the evaporated water entering the airstream takes it's temperature down to 74 degrees. Simple, cheap to operate. It works because today our Relative Humidity is 12% and the Dew Point is 28 degrees. But, as the Desert heat brings about the effect known as "Monsoon", huge amounts of water vapor in the air will be drawn up northward from the Gulf of Mexico, clear up all the way to Canada, humidity will go up, as will the Dewpoint. Once the D.P. reaches 55 degrees for 3 consecutive days, the Meteorologists will claim the Monsoon effect is officially here. When that happens, our trusty evaporative cooler will no longer cool the air as much. We may only get a 20-degree or so drop in air temperature, which might mean our "cool" air coming in is 90 degrees! Then, we get the rumbling Freon compressor going and the A/C will be used instead, at a cost of about 3 times the amount of electrical energy. First day of Summer: what was your location's temperature today? Frank
I think it only got to 89 today in Georgia, because we had our typical afternoon shower to cool things off and make a steam bath. To me the first day of summer is always a teeny bit sad, because it means the days will start getting shorter, although by only a minute tomorrow, but still. Every minute counts.
@Nancy Hart We here in Arizona do not utilize "Daylight Savingtime", but still, it is still light enough to see outdoors at 8:30 PM. The confusion begins when Nevada goes back to standard time, as we spend nearly half of our time over there on the other side of the Colorado River. So, in Winter it is an hour earlier there, and we must tailor trips to restaurants and such accordingly. Frank