Weather and Health
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Skills impairment in hot conditions
You parked your car in the sun for just a short while. Nevertheless, the interior temperature quickly climbed to 65°C or above, enough to melt that favourite music cassette you left on the dashboard. You drive off and the car’s air conditioner slowly becomes effective. The large glass windows, however, can’t prevent the sun’s radiation heating parts of your body. You feel very uncomfortable. On top of that, a spate of road accidents reduced the traffic to a crawl – the other drivers are all idiots. Didn’t you just miss a red light?
An early sign of heat stress is tiredness, heat exhaustion or irritability. Any physical task becomes stressful and the mental performance suffers. Tests of workers with different skills established that the accuracy in physical and mental tasks drops quite markedly even at relatively mild temperatures between 28.5°C and 31°C. Temperatures of 32°C and above led to a notable decrease in short term memory. In an audio vigilance test, Tested Morse code operator made significantly more errors with increasing temperatures. Underground mine workers have to endure high temperatures and humidity. Performance suffers as follows:
> A loss of body weight of around 2% due to sweating results in a work rate dropping by up to 7%
> A weight loss of 4% dramatically lowers the work rate by between 22% and 50%
> Mental performance decreases as dehydration increases above 2%.
Results of examinations performed by students in air conditioned classrooms are significantly
better than the results of students who completed the same exams in a warm environment.
But despite air conditioning, body temperatures of military pilots rose by up to
2°C during flight and while exposed to the sun’s radiation under Perspex-
To blame violent crime on the weather appears to be far-
