LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: HEAT STORY WAS FUN, BUT TEMPS WEREN'T ACCURATE

To the editor:

It was nice to see the weather get front-page attention in your newspaper the other day ("How hot was it in Cape?"), but the story exhibited some problems with basic scientific concepts.

When weather announcers giver the temperature, they are giving the temperature of the air, which is not the same as the temperature of the ground, a car hood or any object sitting in the sunlight. When we take an inexpensive thermometer and hold it in the strong summer sunshine, what we get is the temperature of a piece of plastic and metal heated by solar radiation and perhaps cooled a bit by whatever breeze may be blowing. What we don't get is air temperature.

Meteorologists measure air temperature in the shade in order to keep the sun from heating the material of the thermometer itself, not because it's cooler in the shade. The reason we feel warmer in the sun is because the sun's rays directly heat our skin, not because the air is warmer.

Of course, there's also the heat index, but that's another letter.

BRIAN ALWORTH

Cape Girardeau