The absurdity of weather.com’s ‘Fitness Comfort Index’
The redesigned weather.com has added ‘apps’ to make your weather checking experience a more interactive and time consuming one. One of the apps is the ‘fitness comfort index’. The fine folks at weather.com help you determine if shorts or pants are needed for your outdoor activites and then will tell you whether exercise is : comfortable, moderate or dangerous.
This link to weather.com is from today for the Old Town/Washington area. Apparently highs in the 90s to 100s combined with a dewpoints in the upper 60s to mid 70s yields a moderate level from the fitness comfort index.
This is an insane calculation. All they do is take temperature + relative humidity and then divide it by 4, why? There does not appear to be an answer, but that formula yields some number that lands you in one of the three catergories.
So, I like the idea but when the weather is hot enough to kill the elderly, children, any native European and animals, but the fitness comfort is ‘moderate’ then I believe the fitness comfort formula needs some tweeking.
