As I write this, my weather app tells me the heat index is 110 degrees. These are the dog days of summer.
If Mississippi in the summer feels like the hottest place on earth, you would be very close to being right.
In fact, only a handful of places in the world are hotter than Mississippi in the summer: Phoenix and Las Vegas here in the states. Dubai, Marrakesh, Mecca, Timbuktu and Kuwait City in the Middle East.
When you factor in the incredible humidity and the bugs, you can make a good argument that we have the world’s nastiest summers.
The only place in Australia that could compare would be Darwin, one city in the far north. India and China have some hot cities, but not as hot as Mississippi. Europe, being so far north, and South America, with its higher elevations, don’t even come close.
If it’s this hot in Mississippi, it must be even hotter on the equator, right? Wrong. It never gets cold on the equator, but it never gets as hot as Mississippi in the summer. That’s because the equator never gets more than 12 hours of sunshine. In the summer in Mississippi, we get more than 14 hours of sunshine.
To be scientific, the total amount of solar radiation in a summer day is determined by two factors: the number of hours in the day and the angle of the sun’s rays to the surface. As you go farther north, the days are longer but the angle is slanted. Farther south, the angle is more direct but the days are shorter.
As it turns out, Mississippi’s latitude is in the summer sweet spot. We get the maximum solar radiation for the longest period of time in the summer. Add in the constant humidity from the southerly Gulf winds and you get heat index misery.
Because of this, the population of the South did not grow rapidly until the invention of the air conditioner. You can always put on more clothes when you’re cold, but there’s no stripping off your skin when you’re hot. Even our pools become hot tubs in August.
If you don’t have a heat shield for your car, buy one! I have one for both the front and rear windows. I put the heat shields up with little suction cups and keep the windows rolled down. Not having to hop into a 140-degree car several times a day makes a big difference.
Not to fret. Mississippi’s annual average temperature is a perfect 65 degrees. If you like changing seasons, Mississippi has it all in as mild a manner as possible.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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