Like what is the difference between cold and warm air besides the temperature, and why does the temperature matter?
In: Planetary Science
At the most basic level, higher temperatures make water molecules more excited, so they’re more likely to jump to the vapor phase (basically just evaporation) and the air molecules are farther apart, so there’s more room for the water to go.
The fancy word for this is psychrometrics. It’s a property of air and relates the temperature of the air to how much water it can hold. That amount of water in the air is called humidity and can be measured as either absolute humidity (the total amount of water in the air) or relative humidity (which is the percentage of how much water is in the air compared the maximum amount it can hold). In general, the air wants to hold about half as much water as it’s capable of (50% relative humidity). When it’s really cold, that amount of water is really low. As the air warms up, when it’s in your lings for instance), the heirs capacity to hold water goes up, but there’s still the same amount of water, so the relative humidity goes down. This causes the air to suck up water and dry out anything wet it touches.
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