RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IT'S AS HOT AS A WOOD STOVE'S GRIDDLE AND WET AS A FARM POND

Those are pretty exact measurements, if you grew up with a wood cookstove or ever swam in a pond with snapping turtles.

The temperature has been hovering at around 90 Missouri degrees in recent days. For those of you who may be from North Dakota or some other foreign land, there are Fahrenheit temperatures. And there are Celsius temperatures, which can also be called centigrade temperatures. There may even be some other exotic ways of measuring hot and cold, but I think you get the picture.

In Missouri -- especially in the southeast quadrant of the Show Me State -- temperatures are measured in Missouri degrees. Without sounding like a science textbook, let me try to explain Missouri degrees.

Quite simply, you don't measure temperatures in this part of the state just by how hot or how cold they are. No, that would be too simple. In this part of the state, you also have to factor in how wet the air is.

Some folks have a word for how wet or dry the air is. They call it humidity. As it turns out, most folks who talk about humidity have no clue what they're talking about. They're from Arizona or Colorado, where there is no humidity -- and where they try to fool you into thinking that 110 Arizona degrees in the shade is decent outdoor weather.

I have a response for that line of thinking, but it doesn't fit in a family newspaper.

In Missouri, if you say the word "humidity," thunderheads immediately form, and lightning bolts zap across the sky, and it rains like the dickens. That's just how close to the edge we are in this state, weatherwise-speaking.

Missouri degrees aren't nearly as complicated as those heating-degree days they talk about on your electric and gas bill but never bother to explain. If you've already figured out heating-degree days, then you don't need any help with Missouri degrees.

The formula for Missouri degrees is simple: just add 10 to the temperature, which gives you the humidity. So if it's 90 Missouri degrees, that means the thermometer is stuck on 90 and the humidity is 100 percent.

If you look at weather records back to the late 1800s, you'll see that between the last half of June and the first half of September in Southeast Missouri the humidity is always 10 more than the temperature. Go look it up.

Sure, there are some meteorwhatchamacallems who use a lot of fancy instruments and computers to decide how hot it is and how high the humidity is on the day before the next to the last day of spring. But any true-blue Southeast Missourian knows that all you need is a good old feed-store thermometer to tell both the temperature and the humidity this time of year.

Weather forecasters go a step further and talk about something called "relative humidity." Quite frankly, it doesn't do me a whole lot of good to know how hot and wet my kinfolk are. But there it is anyway: Relative humidity is such and such. Like that's going to change my plans for the day.

There's another way to tell about the heat and humidity in Southeast Missouri, and it's almost as reliable as the Missouri-degrees method.

Find a spot in your neighborhood or outside your office or factory window where you can see quite a ways. Pick a landmark -- a sycamore tree, say -- about a stone's throw across the way. No, you don't need a yardstick to figure out a stone's throw. Once you've picked you're landmark, use it as a heat-and-humidity reference point. If you can see the tree and you can see the leaves rustling in the breeze, it's about 50 Missouri degrees, and it's probably late April or early October. If you can see the tree but you don't know if it has leaves or not, it's about 80 Missouri degrees, and it's probably mid-June or early September. If you look for the tree in the heavy haze and can't remember exactly where that old sycamore was the last time you saw it, it's 90 Missouri degrees or more, and it's the middle of a Missouri summer.

I know I haven't told any of you Missouri natives a single thing you didn't already know. But let's remember that there are a lot of folks who are new to this area. They keep saying things about the weather, and they are borderline panic cases, because they never had anything like this in North Dakota or Utah or wherever it is they're from.

Just wait until you tell them that if Cape Girardeau had a tornado warning system we'd all meet more of our neighbors, because then we'd all know when to go outside to look at those green clouds instead of having to rely on our own storm-weather instincts.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.