WELDON SPRINGS, Mo. – During the solar eclipse Monday, you may have noticed that as the eclipse reached its peak, it got kind of chilly.
There were shifts in the wind, a drop in temperature and a rise in humidity.
“It’s actually fairly common, and there are several sites. If you go through some of the data across the entire region, all the way from Texas up to the upper Midwest, when that shadow or blockage of the sun’s solar insulation or that energy is blocked, it’s almost just like a cloud, a thick cloud at that,” Jared Maples from the National Weather Service said. “That heating of the surface of the Earth no longer happens, so once you stop that heating, you’re stopping that source of the heat as well, so temperatures suddenly drop.”
The effect is comparable to how shaded areas feel cooler than those in direct sunlight, and that’s exactly what we experienced.
During the totality peak, some temperatures dropped roughly 6 to 10 F.
As well as this, winds shifted and humidity increased.
“Those higher winds are caused by some of the energy of the sun that is hitting the surface. Once you cut all of that out and you lower those temperatures, you’re not getting the mixing you once were with some of the warming temperatures,” Maples said. “So yeah, you do observe a drop in the winds.”
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