The question pretty much sums it up. How TF is the asphalt 20-40° hotter than the air when it’s super hot?
In: 531
There are two characteristics of a material or a body regarding heat.
The first is its sensible heat. Basically, the amount of heat a body needs to heat 1º. The bigger the sensible heat, the more energy is needed to heat that material. Generally speaking, stuff with lots of water has high sensible heat while stuff that are metallic/oxides in nature have low sensible heat. It’s easy to see this with a block of concrete compared to a water pool: the first needs far less energy to be heated than the water.
The second is the thermal radiation. Basically, how much energy is lost across a period of time for a body. This is proportional to the temperature of a body: i.e: the hotter a body is, the more energy it emits through radiation.
So with the two paragraphs above, its somewhat easy to understand what happens. Stuff full of water take too much energy to increase their temperature, making them at a somewhat low temperature and thus radiating little heat while dry stuff like concrete/asphalt heat up throughout the day by absorbing solar radiation, massively increasing their temperature up to a equilibrium of heat absorbed = heat radiated and only really cooling off at night.
Latest Answers