Heat Acclimation

Yes. Definitely, my nearest weather station is 40 miles away. I have a Tempe, use it Garmin! Or at least open up your temp detection to more weather stations!

There's nothing we can do: it's totally broken.

The only way to increase heat acclimation on a Fenix in my case (I live by the sea and the nearest airport is a little inland, around 20km from us) is to start training from late morning to late afternoon.

During summer I always start my runs around 6:30, where here it's already above heat acclimation threshold (>22°), but at the airport is say 20°, so they never count, even though I start sweating like crazy after 2 minutes of run.

Then I hike in the weekends with temperatures that may be lower than 22° for the first 10-20% of the activity, while for the rest is often waaay higher than 22°.

In both cases they do not count for heat acclimation. In fact, it often drops the value for each day in which it thinks I'm not training in the heat.

Obviously I always bring a Garmin Tempe with me which reports temperatures well above 22°.

So yes, Heat Acclimation feature is broken, thus useless.

Take this early morning hike as an example. This is the data from my Garmin Tempe.

At the end of the activity (12:45) Garmin Connect reports just the starting temperature (7:40) taken from a nearby airport, which was even much lower than the one in my location:

So, for Garmin no heat acclimation, because the activity was recorded at a temperature lower than 22 °C (72 °F).

The reality is different. I started the climb at around 23 °C (73 °F) which was already higher than heat acclimation threshold. Then the morning went on and so the temperature despite the shade under full tree cover.

For more than 60% of the hike it was higher than 22 °C and, at the end, in full sun, at the lower altitude, it reached around 28 °C (82 °F), but no, to Garmin it was still 18 °C (64 °F).

Garmin, remove heat acclimation feature: it doesn't make any sense.

It's completely broken for me - the big issue is that apparently it uses a local airport - the problem where I live (being in a mountainous area) is that they ARE no airports, so temperature is probably coming from Manchester / Liverpool which basically isn't even in the same ballpark weather wise.

Why they don't use local weather stations like the BBC or Met Office use, I have no idea - annoying as there is one 2 miles from home!

I think it would actually be better if you can turn it off.

5135968 said:

Why they don't use local weather stations like the BBC or Met Office use, I have no idea - annoying as there is one 2 miles from home!

Exactly. I understand airports do have correct weather data, but for sure there are many non military official weather stations, which are actually used for weather forecasts. Only in my city there are several "official" stations that are -far- more correct (closest to my location or on higher altitudes where needed) than the closest airport.

I guess Garmin developers live in areas where the climate is pretty much identical in a 25 miles radius, because at least where I live in Italy, such an approximation is almost blasphemy. Anything even from openweathermap or similar service is far better than airports, and they don't cost anything.

Labronico said:

because at least where I live in Italy, such an approximation is almost blasphemy.

Very similar - where I live there is an expression that you can experience 'all 4 seasons in 1 day' because the weather is very changeable and it can be different 10 miles away.

I would not expect the watch to deal with that - but turning it off, would be best solution.

5135968 said:

Very similar - where I live there is an expression that you can experience 'all 4 seasons in 1 day'

Indeed for 40 minutes activities you may just get the (real) temperature at start, but today I started at 7:40 and finished at 12:45… how can any sane developer think it’s reasonable to approximate the whole activity temperature as just the initial instant?

I remember once I was in the Bryce Canyon: -1 °C before sunrise and almost 30 °C at lunch time.