I keep a motorcycle outdoors under a waterproof cover, but noticed that with morning dew the bike is still noticeablely wet on the inside of the cover.
Meanwhile a buddy has his bike in a plywood shed that is by no means air tight but has 4 walls and a roof, but no insulation or air handling fans/AC and he says dew is never an issue..what’s the difference?
In: Planetary Science
The difference is the direct exposure to open sky. At night objects will lose more energy to space through infrared radiation than they receive from space.
This allows the object like your motorcycle to cool down more than the air. On nights where the dew point is close to the air temperature the object can be below the dew point even though the air is not.
The infrared radiation for the motorcycle under the roof isn’t lost to space. It heats up the roof which then reradiates some of that energy back at the motorcycle.
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