D.C.’s Friday weather seemed special for being ordinary

But Friday failed to inflict on the District the harsh meteorological extremism of many days earlier this month — including the four with temperatures above 100 degrees.

However, if averages mean much, they may suggest that days such as Friday cannot readily be relied on to appear here always or often in July.

The average temperature in Washington on Friday’s date now stands at 90 degrees. So it would seem that part of Friday’s allure lay in the five-degree gap between its temperature and the District’s average July 26 temperature.

Possibly Friday’s sense that summer had a benign side, might have been earned physiologically. The many days of extreme and above average temperatures this summer have likely caused acclimatization and a process of adjustment.

But cloudy skies also played an obvious part in moderating Friday’s conditions.

For much of the day, clouds shielded the city from the wilting effects of the summertime sun. It is just a little more than five weeks since the sun was at its absolute annual acme.

Feeling its full late-July strength for protracted periods in the glare of streets without shade, with solar rays reflected from concrete and marble would have made Friday seem far less comfortable than it did.

A major contributor to Friday’s welcome as a well-behaved emissary of summer was the humidity. Or the relative absence thereof.

When summer seems to be at its most intolerable it is ascribed to the joint effect of severe heat and oppressive humidity. Friday was neither too hot nor too humid.

To know the absolute temperature was to know the “feels-like” temperature. Through the day, they were close to identical, meaning that humidity declined to make an 85-degree day seem worse than it was.

This was reflected in the day’s dew points, which were confined to the 50s, a location regarded as comfortable.