why do we sweat more in humid weather?
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We sweat to control body temperature.
Sweat evaporates, which cools the skin. When its humid, the air cannot hold as more water vapor, so sweat evaporates slower, or perhaps it doesn’t evaporate at all. This leads to the body getting hotter, and us sweating more, in an attempt to stay cool.
Humans dump heat by sweating. Sweat evaporates into the air to cool us off. When people get hot, they sweat.
In humid air, the air has less capacity to accept more water. So sweat does not evaporate efficiently. It’s actually entirely possible for it to be too hot and humid for a person to lose heat at all by sweating, about 95F/35C with 100% humidity(and this is in ideal conditions in theory, it is totally possible to have deadly heat waves bellow this temperature because real world conditions do not mirror the theoretical physical limits).
So in humid temps, it’s harder to lose heat by sweating, which warms a person up, which causes them to sweat more to try and lose more heat.
You don’t really sweat much more. Humid absorbs sweat more slowly than dry air, leaving us feeling muggy and hot.
In humid weather, the sweat that would normally evaporate to keep us cool can’t evaporate as fast, therefore cannot cool us or is it usually would. Sweat that would normally evaporate stays on your body, building up as your body sweats more and more. Note: scientists and weathermen, I mean weather persons, sometimes use what’s called a wet bulb thermometer. It is exactly what it sounds like, a thermometer wrapped in a wet cloth which simulates the human body’s difficulty in sweating & cooling in humid weather.
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