Iran city hits suffocating heat index of 154 degrees, near world record

[SheilaT]

11. I have lived in fairly cold places

both northern NYS and Minnesota, as well as some fairly hot ones, Washington DC (without a/c), Phoenix and Tucson. So I have a lot of personal acquaintance with both wind chill and heat index.

On a personal note, when we moved from Minneapolis to Phoenix, my Minnesota friends would try to say, Oh, it's a dry heat. Dry heat? Try turning your blow drier, the one you use for your hair, on your face, and leave it on. Plus, overnight lows of 99 degrees? Actually the thing that got them to best understand the difference between the two was when I pointed out that the typical first day that the ice was off the lakes in MSP (Lake Harriet, Lake of the Isles, and Lake Calhoun) was the same date as the typical first date for 100 degrees in Phoenix. Both were (back in the early 1980's anyway) April 15. 100 degrees. Ice off the lakes.

The last summer that I lived in Tucson, 1968, we had a heat wave. Every single day it went over 100 degrees. Only one day did it not (downtown, not the official airport temp which was noticeably cooler) did it not go over 115 degrees. I wound up with a mild heat stroke. Not serious, but not very pleasant either.

Another comment on wind chill. One day, in January 1970, I think it was, the DC area was having then record low temps, just above zero degrees. I stood at a bus stop, nearly in tears because it was so cold. Wind chill of minus twenty. I took the bus to National Airport, where I got on a plane to Utica, NY. When I got off the plane, I laughed out loud, because I could tell it was minus twenty degrees (easily confirmed by the thermometer outside the entrance to the airport) and I wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as I'd been two hours earlier in DC.