I did my main army tour at Yuma Arizona, at the desert environmental test station. For quite a few of our tests, if we didn't get to at least 105F (40.5C) we'd have to wait a day for "better test conditions." We didn't wait out too many days. One particular day when I stood in one spot too long on the blacktop tank test track, I left a rather large puddle where the boot polish melted and ran off my boots. I think the surface temp we measured on the blacktop that day was somewhere around 165F, although the air "shade temp" was only about 108F. Many vehicle surfaces (esp. sheetmetal) would blister your hands if you touched them.

When things started to cool off one fall, and we couldn't get even consistent 100F for testing, they loaded up half of the people and sent them to Wainright Alaska to run winter environmental tests. Up there, -30F (-34C) was considered the maximum temperature at which some of the tests were good, and some of them said they saw "a few days" of -60F.

I was in the middle of an 11 month endurance test on one of my vehicles, so I didn't get to go north. Just a stroke of (BG) bad luck, I guess.

I hadn't paid much attention to the humidity during our past week here, but one of the old newspapers that was still in the bin said that on a day when the high was 111F, the RH was at 87%; so I guess here it's been the heat and the humidity.

One forecaster on TV the other night was claiming that the "average monthly temperature" for every month since May has been at least 10F above the long term average for the month. Since there are several ways they can calculate those averages, and he didn't say which way he used, I'm less than fully impressed; but it does seem that it's been fairly consistently warmer than I remember from my younger lifetime.

John