Lola Gayle, STEAM Register
You can add one more danger to the list of perils faced in children’s bounce houses: a sizzling microclimate.
On a summer’s day, bounce houses can become hot and lead to serious health risks — similar to leaving your small child in a hot car, according to a new University of Georgia (UGA) study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Click here for weather-related bounce house accident statistics and video from Weather to Bounce.
“Heat illnesses like heat stroke can be deadly and occur in children participating in sports, left alone in parked cars, and as our study shows, potentially when playing in bounce houses,” said Andrew Grundstein, UGA professor of geography and co-author on the study. “Children are more sensitive to heat than adults and parents need to carefully watch their children for signs of overheating when active on hot and humid days.”
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Symptoms of heat stress include:
Fatigue
Nausea
Vomiting
Dizziness
Flushed, moist skin
Researchers at UGA looked at hazards relating to bounce houses. Last July, they found that air temperatures inside a bounce house were consistently greater than ambient conditions. Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA
For the study, the research team experimented with a typical bounce house placed on the UGA campus in July 2015. Weather conditions were representative of a typical summer day in the area and measurements were taken over a five-hour period. Over that time, the researchers found that the air temperature inside the bounce house was indeed warmer than outside. For a 92-degree summer day, the bounce house added almost 4 degrees to the temperature. But peak bounce house temperatures exceeding 100 F were almost 7 degrees Fahrenheit more than outside temperatures, reports Alan Flurry for UGA.
The researchers also factored for heat index and found that the differences inside and outside of the bounce house was larger than for air temperatures alone. The average heat index reached almost 104 F in the bounce house, over 7 degrees Fahrenheit more than outside, and its peak temperature of 117 F was over 8 degrees Fahrenheit greater, Flurry writes.
According to Marshall Shepherd, UGA Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences and co-author on the study, this is something that no one had really examined before.
“I knew it was a problem when I watched my child in one on a particularly hot day and our early findings confirmed my suspicions,” he said. “Hopefully it makes parents more aware of something they probably overlooked.”
As a guide to help public safety officials, the media and parents assess possible heat-related hazard to children, researchers developed a modified heat index table presented in Fahrenheit that is included in the study (Table 3).
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