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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if people confuse wet bulb and dry bulb here. Wet bulb is related to how well your air conditioner or sweating will cool you. Dry bulb is what we usually say when taking a temperature reading, or listening to the local news' meteorologist.

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Wet bulb temperature doesn’t have anything to do with air conditioning, unless you’re only talking about evaporative coolers.

Fair. Cooling towers in commercial HVAC use evaporative cooling. Residential cooling doesn't, but still has to exchange heat to a system above the load it common transfers. I think it may be worse in these situations, but I am not sure.

Sure, but the water in commercial AC is just to cool the compressor coils. It still uses a phase change system like any other AC, so it’s not limited by the wet bulb temperature (although the warmer the ambient temperature is, the less efficient it is).

What is the efficiency rate at 35°C Wetbulb?

Not that much different from the efficiency at 30 or 40.

Ya, for messaging, "wet bulb" doesn't work well. We need a more intuitive phrase, like a "wind chill factor" for heat + humidity = danger.

Edit: chewing on "wet heat factor". What do you think? Cliches like "but it's a 'dry heat' harhar" are already common. So "wet heat" might click.

IMO wet bulb is much more intuitive. The parameters for heat index are subjective.

I believe the intuition depends on context. In common jargon Wet Bulb isn't widely understood!

https://www.weather.gov/ama/heatindex

Nice, thanks. FWIW, I just checked, and wunderground reports both temp and 'feels like', apparently matching the NWS Heat Index:

https://www.wunderground.com/hourly/us/tx/dallas

The problem is that wet-bulb temperature is not the Heat Index or a "feels-like" temperature. Here's a bit more info: https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/definit...

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