It’s official, red alerts have gone out across the entire country of Brazil as the heat index hits 137F. The high temperature combined with humidity has made it impossible for most people to carry out their normal lives. There’s already reports of power outages. People can’t work. They can’t run errands. They can barely sleep. It’s not even summer there yet.
Red alerts have been issued for almost 3,000 towns and cities across Brazil, which have been experiencing an unprecedented heatwave.
Rio de Janeiro recorded 42.5C on Sunday - a record for November - and high humidity on Tuesday meant that it felt like 58.5C, municipal authorities said.
More than a hundred million people have been affected by the heat, which is expected to last until at least Friday.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67422663?ref=okdoomer.io
I think what matters here is that the humidity makes this a wet bulb or something similar to a wet bulb instead of actually an oven. It’s super doom but it’s a slightly different and honestly worse kind.
Today’s high temp and humidity in Rio gives them a Wet Bulb Globe Temperature of 77⁰F, which is not great. WBGT of 80⁰-90⁰F is the danger zone, and recent research has suggested that WBGT 85⁰ is probably a more realistic upper limit of human safety.
Sources if you would like to do some doom math yourself:
https://www.wunderground.com/weather/br/rio-de-janeiro
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00738.2021
They have clearly linked their source as BBC. Also, pretty much all major publications have reported on it. Here’s a report by AP: https://apnews.com/article/brazil-heat-wave-climate-environment-wildfires-1e4714fb2c6566120c13cf4e2b657f7d
