20 6 / 2012
What Is the Heat Index?
© BRIAN SNYDER/Reuters/Corbis
While the notion of humidity making days feel warmer is painfully apparent to anyone who’s ever been outside on a soupy day, our current system owes a big debt to Robert G. Steadman, an academic textile researcher. In a 1979 research paper called, “An Assessment of Sultriness, Parts I and II,” Steadman laid out the basic factors that would affect how hot a person felt under a given set of conditions, and meteorologists soon used his work to derive a simplified formula for calculating heat index.
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