THE WEATHER: Humiture Wave

When Messrs. Dun & Bradstreet reported last week that U. S. retail sales for July were 16% below 1937, they added an explanation: “excessive heat replacing heavy rainfall as a deterrent to shoppers.” Ice cream consumption in seven days was 500,000 gal. above normal. No adequate figures were available on the consumption of gasoline, soft drinks, railroad tickets and many another commodity, but it was evident that extraordinary weather had made substantial losses and profits for businessmen. And last week for the second in succession, most of the U. S. east of the Rockies lay sweltering under a heat & humidity wave.

Few heat records were broken, but temperatures of 90° or higher were recorded day after day in Kansas City, Baltimore, Boston, Washington—in most cases accompanied by unusually high humidity readings. (In Washington, 92°, a woman telephoned the Weather Bureau, asked “Where will I have to go to cool off? New Hampshire?” “Sorry,” replied the Weather Bureau, “it’s 90 in New Hampshire.”) The Act of God which produced these extraordinary phenomena was the misbehavior, for no apparent reason, of high and low pressure areas. These areas usually proceed across the U. S., from west to east, in a stately procession so that the weather changes every two or three days, cool winds from the moving highs, which are generally accompanied by fair weather, blowing into the intervening lows where cool winds meeting hot moist air cause rainfall.

Last week, a high over the southeastern States spread hot moist air from the Gulf of Mexico across the eastern half of the U. S. and southern lows simultaneously moved farther north than usual. Result: a predominance of hot and damp southern air. One good low, traveling across the country, would have attracted cooler air from Canada, but instead of enjoying cool Canadian breezes, the U. S. was treated to an uninterrupted outpouring of subtropical air.

The weather served to publicize a new word: humiture. The invention of a 38-year-old official of Manhattan’s National City Bank, Osborne Fort Hevener, it was first used by his friend Frank L. Baldwin in the weather column of the Newark Evening News. Humiture is a combination of temperature and humidity, computed by adding the readings for both and dividing by two. Weathermen called it a “fool word” but according to Mr. Hevener (who last week escaped the humiture by motoring to Quebec) this figure “gives the man in the street a better index of the summertime torture to which he is being subjected.” Peak Manhattan humiture: (with temperature 76 and humidity 98% of saturation) 87.