With warmer temperatures on tap again for this week you may see the term heat index and it’s important to know what that means. 

Dallas County Emergency Management Specialist Josh Heward says the heat index is a measure of how hot it really feels outside using a mixture of different factors. 

“An example for that would be if the air temperature is 96 degrees fahrenheit and the relative humidity is 65-percent, then there is a heat index chart that is out there on weather.gov, that reading would be 121 degrees fahrenheit.”

Heward tells Raccoon Valley Radio the higher temperatures can begin to dry out your skin because of the humidity not allowing your body to breath like normal. 

“I think the other thing that it does is it kind of gives people that false sense, you say that it’s 86-degrees outside but you have that high relative humidity where it’s really over 100 outside and people don’t look at it as being that hot.”

The heat index chart can be found here.