>On a scorching Texas afternoon,
Something I'm very familiar with, and the drone data speaks for itself as far as what it's like in the hot sun of southeast Texas.
Then how about at night?
Those buildings can then act like heat islands that can take more than one night for the heat to dissipate too.
Some cool off that much, some don't. Thermodynamics at work.
Based on heated mass is how long it takes to cool back off to ambient temp by morning. Good air circulation can help a lot too.
If everybody's roof is soaking up heat all day, the structures underneath that are being actively cooled at the same time are not expected to have nearly as much heated mass that needs to dissipate, and the only time for that might be at night.
But maybe that same amount of heat was actively dispersed into the surrounding air all day by the air conditioning units of the cooled structures, plus some of the night. And how efficient are A/C units anyway? That's got to make a difference too so it's not just abandoned buildings but any time people are not running A/C even while dwelling there. At least the windows are open then.
So the drone data on the buildings looks realistic so far, but everything else is just beginning to trickle in.
Regardless, I'm just fine without A/C in the summer in Houston if I'm in a proper place like a 100-year-old home that was built for it.
But I grew up in Florida when about the only places with A/C were supermarkets and banks, not even most college dorms or classrooms had it when I got there.
You just sweat more in Florida, because it may not reach 100 Fahrenheit all summer but the humidity makes Houston feel like a desert by comparison, and it sure doesn't cool off as much at night like it does in Houston with its milder type of "Northern Living" :)
Is there something specific to your geography that leads you to assume the temperature 60 miles away wouldn't "be anywhere close to yours"?
Even between places at roughly the same elevation, the climate can vary hugely within 60 miles of a coast. And a majority of the population of the US lives within 60 miles of a coast.
I live in a forest. When it’s 28C here, it’ll be 36C in the village a few km away. It’ll drop to 16C overnight here but they have a low of 28C.
All that masonry, concrete, blacktop, the absence of shade, and you basically just have a great big passive thermal accumulator.
The hottest temperatures get to be about the same, but the trees don't hold heat like the concrete does. It falls off so much faster up here. It seems you can cool these houses with barely half the HVAC capacity that the other ones tend to require. Which is wild because the power grid up here is also much cheaper.