“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” So goes the summertime lament wailed by every weather watcher across the country. Humidity is generally acknowledged as a serious factor affecting a region’s climate comfort: cities in the West are generally thought to have a pleasant dry heat, while the unfortunate South- and Northeast are doomed to virtual swamplike conditions from June to September. Or that’s the conventional wisdom, anyway.
It seems like residents of every Gulf Coast or Atlantic seaboard city like to boast that their town’s average relative humidity is the worst, the highest, or the most hair-raisingly unbearable in the whole country. But the real location of our nation’s humidity hot spots, drawn from data compiled in 2008 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), may surprise you.
The Most Humid City: Quillayute/Forks, Washington
This moody, wet, rainy area on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula has the highest average levels of relative humidity in the country. The yearly average is 83.5 percent, even though the average temperature—even in the summer months—doesn’t rise above 70 degrees. Since the area is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, Puget Sound on the east, and the Olympic Mountains to the south, the wet, humid air and precipitation systems blow in off the ocean and get trapped by the mountains. The peninsula is so humid that it even features one of the world’s few temperate-zone rainforests.
The Rest of the Top Ten Offenders:
2. Mount Washington, New Hampshire (83 percent)
3. Astoria, Oregon (81 percent)
4. Port Arthur, Texas (80 percent)
5. Lake Charles, Louisiana (79.5 percent)
6. Corpus Christi, Texas (78.5 percent)
7. Victoria, Texas (78.5 percent)
8. Brownsville, Texas (78 percent)
9. Houston, Texas (78 percent)
10. Olympia, Washington (78 percent)
Although residents of Southern cities and states may howl in protest and disbelief, NOAA data confirms that these ten cities’ average annual levels of relative humidity—the measure of the amount of water in the air at a specific temperature without the water condensing—are indeed the nation’s highest.
