Posts Tagged ‘tropical dew points’
Parched Earth
We zoomed home without incident yesterday, except for one unsettling moment at a construction site. Signs were warning of the road work ahead, so I wasn’t surprised when traffic came to a halt. The shock came when the large truck we were following began moving, revealing many emergency vehicles with flashing lights instead of construction equipment.
There was an ambulance and a firetruck, two damaged vehicles, and a significant number of former occupants congregated nearby. Behind all the EMS personnel stood all the construction crews biding their time until the scene was turned back over to them.
The dew point temperature when we left Hayward read 79°F, with temps already in the 80s. The level of mugginess was downright tropical. I checked the reading for 125 miles away at home and found the same result. Yuck.
What we found when we arrived at our property was a very parched earth. Wherever trees shaded the grass, it looked a healthy green. Anywhere the sun was baking the turf, it was visibly brittle and fading to beige.
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Asher met us with surprising calm, acknowledging our return with a mere lean against each of us in turn for some scratches. It was a greeting we appreciated. He seems so well-adjusted and content with the living conditions we are providing for him. It helps to have great animal sitters covering our absences.
There wasn’t a lot we could do to offer the horses relief from the heat. Cyndie put fly masks on to give their eyes a break from the nagging pests and turned up the speed on the fans aimed under the overhang.
It looked like the horses might have been digging for water in the dry bed of Paddock Lake. They don’t normally mess with it after the water evaporates, leaving the bottom to become covered with a cracked, dried mud base. Now it looks a bit like they are creating a sandbox.
We need rain. I’m not exactly comforted by the forecast that suggests chances of storms on Thursday and Friday after the extremely dangerous tornado that hit Appleton and Menasha in northeastern Wisconsin yesterday. We just want some moisture to fall, and not in the form of 100% humidity. Is a good soaking rain too much to ask?
Our soil is parched, I tell ya. It needs a drink!
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Our Turn
It arrived with a vengeance yesterday. It is our turn to cope with Earth’s new reality of oppressive heat waves. Tropical dew point temperatures push the high heat to feel ten degrees hotter and land us well into three-digit heat index numbers.
As with every weather extreme, the horses just seem to roll with it. We left fans on high under the overhang and they didn’t expend any more effort than necessary all day long.
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Wearing masks to give their eyes a break from the never-ending harassment from flies, they stayed in the shade where the attack of solar energy was ameliorated by a degree or two. Well, except for Mia. When we showed up to serve their evening feeding, she was out grazing in the back pasture all by herself.
Cyndie decided to walk down and offer Mia a pan in the shade which she promptly accepted. It was uncomfortably hot but not intolerable with pockets of cooler air wafting out from under the shade trees on an occasional breeze.
Asher came out with us and pounced into the woods to force squirrels into hasty retreats to the highest branches above. When horses were tended to, Asher was more than happy to return with us to lie on the cool tile floor of our air-conditioned living space.
I took advantage of avoiding outdoor work by giving in to a delicious afternoon nap in the recliner. What a privileged life we live.
I shudder to comprehend how people in places where this kind of heat lasts for months deal with nights that don’t get cool. We went down to the barn just before sunset to close things up, turn off the fans, and remove fly masks but the heat had barely budged from the peak in the afternoon.
Light was sweating, which wasn’t visible when we fed them earlier. The heat of the day was still accumulating.
Our turn dealing with the blast furnace of this over-heating planet will be mercifully short. After today things will moderate a bit and by Saturday the forecast looks almost chilly in comparison.
The horses give me a sense that they understand this and use that superpower to bolster their impressive art of coping when conditions are just plain miserable.
Our retreat to the geothermally cooled house is a less impressive method of coping, but it is oh. so. effective.
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Relative Something 