Temperatures were near the freezing mark Thursday morning in Daytona Beach, but you might not have known it by checking your smartphone or the National Weather Service's website, which reported temperatures of 99–100 degrees at the World's Most Famous Beach.
The reason, it turns out, was because someone accidentally reported the temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.
We reached out to a National Weather Service spokesperson, who said there was an equipment failure at the Daytona Beach reporting site at 4:03 a.m. Thursday.
Someone was sent to take the temperature manually and observed it was 37°F, but mistakenly reported the temperature as 37°C.
That's equivalent to about 99°F — to be more exact, 98.6°F, coincidentally the same as our normal human body temperature.
As a result, temperatures later in the morning read up to 100°F, or 38°C, in not only Daytona Beach, but also other nearby cities including New Smyrna Beach and Port Orange.
In reality, NASCAR fans at Daytona International Speedway were bundled up in layers amid near-freezing temperatures.
The National Weather Service corrected the mistake, and shortly after 9 a.m., the temperature in Daytona Beach accurately read 37°F, or 3°C.
The United States is one of only three countries that does not officially use the metric system — officially called the International System of Units — which includes the Celsius temperature scale. The other two are Myanmar and Liberia, and Myanmar announced its plan to metricate in 2013, according to a recent article on Vox.
Measurement conversion mix-ups have had much more severe consequences in the past. One of the costliest metric mishaps caused NASA to lose a $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, because an engineering contractor used English units, while NASA was using the metric system.