If your eyeglasses fogged up as you stepped out of your vehicle yesterday, or you can see condensation on the outside of your home’s windows, you could not only feel, but you could SEE how humid it was in Minnesota Monday.
The atmosphere was soooo juicy, it made already hot temperatures feel like they were as high as 120-degrees.
But why?
Blame it on the corn.
No, really.
The corn and other crops that are plentiful this time of year in the Midwest give off a lot of moisture, making the air, well, moist.
According to a story from Scientific American, the effect is technically known as “evapotranspiration.”
“This process…is akin to how humans perspire in the heat,” said Lincoln, Illinois National Weather Service Meteorologist Andrew Taylor. He told Scientific American the hot temperatures are joined with moist air “streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico and a phenomenon that is sometimes called ‘corn sweat.’ The latter happens when corn, soybeans and other crops release moisture as the temperature climbs.”
And all that extra moisture in the air makes hot temperatures feel even hotter and more uncomfortable. And dangerous.
The Guardian newspaper says one acre of corn — an area a little smaller than the size of an American football field, can create as much as 4,000 gallons of “corn sweat.” And if you’ve ever driven through Iowa, you know how much corn there is. (Hours and hours of cornfields. But I digress…)
So even though Minnesota would have likely experienced a heatwave this week anyway, it’s made worse because of the superjuicy atmosphere. And that supercharged atmosphere helps create bigger and more severe storms like we saw in the southern half of the state last night that knocked out power to the State Fairgrounds and parts of the Twin Cities and heavy rains caused some road flooding in Sartell.
All made worse because the corn and other crops are “sweating.”
LOOK: The most extreme temperatures in the history of every state
Stacker consulted 2021 data from the NOAA’s State Climate Extremes Committee (SCEC) to illustrate the hottest and coldest temperatures ever recorded in each state. Each slide also reveals the all-time highest 24-hour precipitation record and all-time highest 24-hour snowfall.
Keep reading to find out individual state records in alphabetical order.
Gallery Credit: Anuradha Varanasi
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