DO you think it has been seriously hot recently? Think again! Imagine Grocott’s Mail’s surprise when Garth Sampson of the Port Elizabeth office of the South African Weather Service told us that the recent heat was “completely normal” and well within the regional norms for this time of year.
DO you think it has been seriously hot recently? Think again! Imagine Grocott’s Mail’s surprise when Garth Sampson of the Port Elizabeth office of the South African Weather Service told us that the recent heat was “completely normal” and well within the regional norms for this time of year.
He said that the high humidity coupled with the high temperatures is the reason it has been especially uncomfortable.
Sampson told us that “a heat wave is defined as when the temperature is five degrees higher than the highest average temperature for a given region for three consecutive days” and that therefore the recent high temperatures were in fact completely normal for this time of year.
Speaking to some local schools they certainly have been feeling the heat with many cancelling sport on certain afternoons.
Both St Andrew’s College and DSG made the concession to allow their pupils to wear sports clothes rather than their regular uniforms on very hot days.
Speaking to Dr Des Pyle from Kingswood College he said “we carefully calculate the heat index and when it reaches a certain level (106 in this case) we decide on the appropriate course of action. One afternoon only sport was cancelled and on another, when the temperature was around 42° Celcius afternoon lessons as well as sport were cancelled.”
The formula used is (2x air temperature) + (relative humidity x air temperature) + 24 = the heat index . The heat index number can range anywhere from 80 to 156.
