How Heat and Humidity Affect the Distance You Hit Your Shots

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. Or so they say. For golfers, however, both factors affect the distance golf balls fly.

But how and to what extent? Let’s start with heat.

Experience has probably told you that you get more lift as the weather warms up. Your experience is not wrong. As temperatures rise, shots fly further, and not just because it’s easier for your muscles to become more flexible. Your golf ball becomes more flexible, too, in a sense. The materials become more responsive, causing the ball to bounce off the clubface at a higher speed. Plus, warm air is less dense than cold air (remember those high school chemistry lessons about how heat makes molecules accelerate and disperse? Well, it’s true), which means your shots encounter less drag as they soar majestically through the air.

So, that’s the good news. The bad news is that warm air won’t turn you into Bryson DeChambeau, because the effects of temperature are relatively modest. While the formula isn’t perfect, tests conducted on Trackman have shown that golfers who hit their drives around 250 yards gain about 2 yards for every 10 degrees of temperature increase, and lose about the same for every 10 degrees of temperature decrease. To become Bryson-Lung, you might have to move to Venus.

What about humidity?

You may have heard that humid air is heavy air: a distance killer. You may even have heard this said by commentators on tournament broadcasts. It’s a common misconception. The opposite is true. Humid air is actually lighter (at the risk of going all Oppenheimer, this is because the hydrogen in an H2O molecule is lighter than the other gases — oxygen and nitrogen — that make up most of air), allowing shots to fly further. Again, however, the gains are relatively small — so small as to be almost imperceptible to the average golfer.

One caveat: All of this is true as long as those water molecules in the air remain in gaseous form. Once they become liquid—that is, once that humidity turns to rain—they dampen distance. Shots don’t fly as far when the air opens up. The harder the rain, the more distance you can expect to lose.

But if it’s just hot and humid, that’s no excuse not to take the photos.

Josh Sens

Golf.com Editor

Josh Sens, a golf, food, and travel writer, has been a GOLF Magazine contributor since 2004 and now contributes to all GOLF platforms. His work has been collected in The Best American Sportswriting. He is also the co-author, with Sammy Hagar, of Are We Having Any Fun Yet: the Cooking and Partying Handbook.