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Comment by hippari | Hacker News Reader

The Wet Bulb temp can use any scale they see fit, it's a derived unit. It's even better if they don't use F and C to avoid confusion.

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> The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth (wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed

It seems to be a direct measurement, not derived from anything. You might be able to derive WBT given the dew point and dry bulb temperature, but it would still need units like C or F.

Perhaps you were thinking of a different measurement?

I believe that's a shortcut to measure WBT directly. By it's nature, WBT are affected by other variables such as humidity and atm pressure, etc... , so it's a derived unit: Twb = F(T, H, P...). As a derived function, you tweak its scale as much as you like, you can take T = C*2 and that solved your problem.

But surely deriving the WBT couldn't change the unit of measurement?

A measurement that has no unit is relative humidity. It is just a percentage. There is no way to measure relative humidity directly and get any other type of unit besides a percentage. Instruments that measure relative humidity directly measure in percentages.

edit: ah, you can use C2 = Celsius*2 whether you're talking about regular temperature or WBT. C2 is the 'derived' unit. Not WBT.

Yes you can use C2, but why not just use F which still has better precision than C2[1]? For low values of C2, you may confuse it with plain C...

[1]: https://uxdesign.cc/celsius-needs-a-redesign-41709e048c4a

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