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Relative humidity is the ratio of how much water vapour is in the air to how much water vapour the air could potentially contain at a given temperature. It varies with the temperature of the air: colder air can contain less vapour, and water will tend to condense out of the air more at lower temperatures.
It will also dry out the airways. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends indoor air be maintained at 20–24.5 °C (68–76 °F) with a 20–60% relative humidity, [12] equivalent to a dew point of approximately 4.0 to 16.5 °C (39 to 62 °F) (by Simple Rule calculation below).
For a constant temperature, the smaller the difference, the more moisture there is, and the higher the relative humidity. In the lower troposphere, more moisture (small dew point depression) results in lower cloud bases and lifted condensation levels (LCL). LCL height is an important factor modulating severe thunderstorms.
Excess free water or hypotonic water can leave the body in two ways – sensible loss such as osmotic diuresis, sweating, vomiting and diarrhea, and insensible water loss, occurring mainly through the skin and respiratory tract. In humans, dehydration can be caused by a wide range of diseases and states that impair water homeostasis in the body ...
Water migrates from areas of high a w to areas of low a w. For example, if honey (a w ≈ 0.6) is exposed to humid air (a w ≈ 0.7), the honey absorbs water from the air. If salami (a w ≈ 0.87) is exposed to dry air (a w ≈ 0.5), the salami dries out, which could preserve it or spoil it.
The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that may be achieved by evaporative cooling of a water-wetted, ventilated surface.. By contrast, the dew point is the temperature to which the ambient air must be cooled to reach 100% relative humidity assuming there is no further evaporation into the air; it is the temperature where condensation (dew) and clouds would form.
Don't rely on bloviating pundits to tell you who'll prevail on Hollywood's big night. The Huffington Post crunched the stats on every Oscar nominee of the past 30 years to produce a scientific metric for predicting the winners at the 2013 Academy Awards.
In the atmosphere, assuming a constant water vapor mixing ratio, the dew point temperature (the temperature where the relative humidity is 100%) decreases with increasing height because the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with height.