What is relative humidity and how does it affect how I feel outside?
Humidity is something we hear about daily in weather reports. Humidity is to blame for that muggy, steam-room feeling you experience on certain summer days. Humidity can be measured in several ways, but relative humidity is the most common. In order to understand relative humidity, it is helpful to first understand absolute humidity. Absolute humidity is the mass of water vapor divided by the mass of dry air in a volume of air at a given temperature. The hotter the air is, the more water it can contain. Relative humidity is the ratio of the current absolute humidity to the highest possible absolute humidity (which depends on the current air temperature). A reading of 100 percent relative humidity means that the air is totally saturated with water vapor and cannot hold any more, creating the possibility of rain. This doesn’t mean that the relative humidity must be 100 percent in order for it to rain — it must be 100 percent where t
