It really is more humid this summer

I have grumbled and complained a lot this summer about the dewpoint, and it turns out I was right all along. Examining over 23,600 readings from Inner Drive Technology World HQ's weather station from 2024 and 2025, I found the following:

This is an apples-to-apples comparison of the data. I used the same number of readings instead of the exact date and time, so the 11,317 readings are from from June 1st at midnight UTC through 21 August 2024 8:07 UTC and 19 August 2025 19:22 UTC, respectively. There was one 5-hour gap in 2025 when the station lost contact with the Internet, but otherwise, the readings are 10 minutes apart with the occasional missed reading.

As you can see, June had the same average dewpoint both years, but then July and August just got swampy this year, both months smothering us with dewpoints almost 2°C higher than last year. Fully 49.7% of the 2025 readings have been over 20°C, while only 33.5% of 2024's were that humid. And because the 2024 sample was about 36 hours longer than 2025, the 27 days that had average dewpoints of at least 20°C were only 33.3% of the 81 days sampled; this year's 41 days were of the 79 days since June 1st, giving us muggy days 51.9% of the time.

It will be interesting to see the full summer data from 2025. (Unfortunately, though the IDTWHQ weather station came online 30 September 2021, Weather Now only started gathering Netatmo data on 25 September 2023.) The important thing is: if you think Chicago weather has sucked more than usual this summer, you're not imagining it.