relative humidity, definition of

Relative Humidity

Relative humidity is a term used to describe the amount of water vapor in a mixture of air and water vapor. It is defined as the partial pressure of water vapor in the air-water mixture, given as a percentage of the saturated vapor pressure, under those conditions

The relative humidity of air thus changes not only with respect to the absolute humidity (moisture content) but also temperature and pressure, upon which the saturated vapor pressure depends. Relative humidity is often used instead of absolute humidity in situations where the rate of water evaporation is important, as it takes into account the variation in saturated vapor pressure.

News & Blog articles where 'relative humidity' used:
  • New Study: Climate Models Get Water Vapor Wildly Wrong – A ‘Major Gap in Our Understanding’
    From the NoTricksZone By Kenneth Richard on 19. February 2024 “Here, we have demonstrated a major discrepancy between observation-based and climate model-based historical trends in near-surface atmospheric water vapor in arid and semi-ari…
  • TAO And TAO Again
    Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Impelled by my restless curiosity, I’ve returned to the TAO buoy dataset to investigate a claim by Dr. Ramanathan of a “super-greenhouse” effect. The TAO buoys are a number of moored buoys located across the Pacific....
  • Heated worries? Be alerted about temperature and humidity
    As many know, I create instrumentation and display systems that do a wide variety of weather monitoring tasks. Usually I focus on weather and climate measurement in situ. Now, I have something useful for alerting you to problems of mission … Continue...

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