WOAY-TV (Oak Hill, WV): Staying healthy this week means drinking lots of water and making sure you have an adequate supply of hand moisturizer. The reason?
Chief Meteorologist Chad Merrill explains (text version below the video):
Very low humidity during the afternoons. One recent example includes December 8 when the humidity at daybreak at the Beckley Memorial Airport was a healthy 45 to 50%. It then plunged down to 15% during the afternoon. A similar trend is expected each afternoon going forward into the early weekend.
Here’s a little analogy to understanding humidity. First of all, if there’s 0% humidity, the air is constantly ingesting moisture when it’s available. The air will intake moisture at 75% humidity, but at a much slower rate. When it reaches 100%, we have fog, mist or precipitation.
The air can’t take in any moisture when the humidity reaches 100%. This transpires to how we feel with the high dew points in the summer. We don’t see the sweat evaporate from our skin. Evaporation is always a cooling process, but if we have the high dew points, the atmosphere can’t readily take in moisture. So we are constantly drinking water. It becomes second nature.
Hydration does not become second nature in the winter during exercise because the sweat readily evaporates from our skin during low humidity days and we feel great. That is, we feel great until we’re depleted of water. How do we get depleted of water when we’re not sweating? When the humidity is low, the atmosphere will keep extracting water from our skin day and night during the winter season.
Chief Meteorologist Chad Merrill has the latest forecast:
