Outdoor evening concerts and summer are synonymous.
Both work well together. The weather is usually fair enough for people to put up with the mugginess, and the music blasting from the speakers usually sounds better because of the atmospheric conditions.
Temperatures impacts
The biggest temperature impact is the location of warmer and cooler air in the layers of the atmosphere.
During the day, the temperature of the air gets cooler as you climb from the ground to the upper parts of the atmosphere.
At night, the surface of the earth cools off faster than the upper layers of the atmosphere. This causes a warmer layer of air aloft with a cooler layer at the surface. In meteorology, this is called an inversion. This warmer layer aloft allows the sound to stay closer to the listening ears of the concertgoers by bending the sound wave back towards the ground.
So if you were to keep the sound level the same, a concert at night in the summer would be louder than during the day.
Overall, sound travels faster in warmer air than cooler because warmer air is less dense.
Wind blows sound
Sound waves can be bent by wind flow, but it usually takes a breezy wind to make a big difference. That is good because on average, wind speed is lower during the summer.
Generally, wind less than 10 mph has little impact on sound. Above that, the direction of wind comes into play.
If the wind is blowing from the stage into the crowd then the sound will not be impacted. But if the wind is blowing from one side of the crowd to the other or stage right to stage left, audio engineers would have to adjust their systems to account for this.
Humidity
Similar to temperature impacts, humidity, and differences in density can alter sound waves.
It may seem counterintuitive, but air with higher amounts of moisture/humidity is less dense than dry air. The lack of density in the humid air won't cause sound waves to be absorbed as much compared to a less humid day in the Spring or Fall.
Higher humidity/less dense air allows sound waves to travel further. Dry air absorbs more of the sound wave. It is a similar effect to a baseball being able to travel further in the humid air.
Dan Harr, the owner of Atlanta Audio Services, said overall sound is easier to mix on a cool night and he prefers dry, cooler air so sound equipment isn't damaged.
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