I don't think this applies as this is a nominally steady state environment, i.e. it's temperature is stabilized regardless of input heat required to stabilize the internal ambient fluid temperature. It's just because they're reading a reflective surface with an IR camera/thermometer, thus giving incorrect readings.

Unless some form of phase change surface cooling (evaporation in this case) is in play.

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I first experienced this while deployed to Afghanistan. Some Brit showed me how to put my bottle of water into a sock and soak the sock with water from a nearby stream. I'd then swing the sock around for a few minutes just to get the water temperature below the 120+ degrees F it was likely at so that it didn't raise our body temp when we drank it. It would often hit 120+ F ambient air temp and sometimes the water would either be in the sun or on top of some surface that was even hotter than the air temp.

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Yeah but the guy who answered incorrectly was definitely thinking of evaporative cooling

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Barring fans and other means of heat transfer, your answer is flow. Heat flows. The PCB is hot, and the room ambient air is probably around 70F. The casing is heated by the PCB but cooled by the ambient air as the heat flows outward.

This can actually be quite accurately modeled, but I'd probably want a better picture of your solid state system before attempting to do so.

It depends on whether you stir with the same linear velocity or the same angular velocity.

The coffee cup is about 9 inches around, and if you stir it once per second, the coffee is moving at 9 inches per second. In a 26 foot pool, 9 inches per second will barely move the water, and it will stop almost as soon as you lift the spoon.

On the other hand, if you stir the pool at one stir (360 degrees) per second, the water will be moving at 980 inches per second (55 miles per hour!), and will keep moving for a very, very long time.

Also, that will probably generate enough outward force to destroy your pool. (I'm too busy to calculate the force right now, but if somebody else wants to, I'd be interested to see it.)

Iirc this is also why they can’t really “see” through glass.

Blocking the frequency range of infrared light or long-wave infrared typically detected by cameras. One reason cars get ungodly hot is due to a bunch of light being absorbed, infrared being emitted, but unable to pass through the windows.

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As a fello colorodoan, and fiber optics engineer I'm qualified to help add to the other answers,

Most of the other comments are accurate about pollen, humidity, etc. A few things left out is the marijuana haze from increased outdoor consumption, an increase in air pollution due to increased vehicle usage, the mirage effect is also more prevalent in Colorado during summer because the relative temperature between the mountain peaks and the plains is relatively similar during winter (A LOT of factors in this), and if you're on the eastern plains looking at the mountains in colorado the contrast plus angle of the sun in winter makes the mountains brighter and stand out more for a lot longer in the day. During the summer if youre up early enough on a cold day in summer the mountains will stand out more than at like noon.

But it would require more energy to achieve the same result. One stir for the pool would equate to many stirs for the cup. The resistance of the larger spoon would be higher. OP's question isn't specific enough to give a proper answer.

What is this type of analysis called? In Compsci it's called "Big O notation" but I'm pretty sure that only applies to computational complexity.

Yeah, if you blow hot air over metal that is much hotter than that air, you will cool the metal. If you blow hot air over metal that is colder than that air, you will heat up the metal. There's no getting around this, ha ha.

Squared cube law?

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Yes, references to Superman and/or the potential necessity for us to make some Unobtanium and send Aaron Eckhart, Hillary Swank, and Stanley Tucci et al., into the bowels of the Earth with a bunch of nukes abound today.

>Even if the max velocity of the water is the same in the pool (ie a very slow rotation rate) then the energy of the water will scale somewhat with the volume of the water, ie cubicly, while the drag of the walls will scale somewhat with the area of the side walls, ie. squared, therefore the larger the cup, the more the kinetic energy of the water outweighs the drag of the sides.

The centripetal force increases friction aswell angular momentum. So it increases the energy lost due to friction aswell as the increase in surface area.

I've been playing with a thermal camera and not only do I observe what you're describing, I also clearly saw my reflection in a tile wall with the thermal camera.

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Yours is a very important comment, even if it doesn't propose the explanation for the "cooler" metal. Your comment reveals how important it is to understand the problem. The lack of understanding is a bane to the engineering field! (Though, it is a gift to some physicists who love an excuse to bust the chops of engineers, a la Sheldon Cooper.)The foul temptress of expediency of thought occasionally seduces engineers into spouting off solution methods that are associated with the problem. They can do this without actually confirming that the solution method is truly applicable. As you pointed out in this case, the solution of "explain the cooling by conductive loss to the air" could not apply since the air was hotter than the metal. (Also, eEven if the air were cooler, it would be in order to do a scale analysis to see if it was the primary issue.)