What is the Science Behind Wet-Bulb Temperature and Evaporative Cooling?

[Absentee]

Homework Statement

Imagine a wet thermometer whose bulb is covered with a wet wick at 1 atm. Temperature of the water happens to drop during the process of evaporation.

Homework Equations

N/A

The Attempt at a Solution

Does evaporation lower the temperature of water just by removing high-kinetic-energy molecules and lowers it's temperature, just so there can be a driving force for heat transfer? So basically heat from the air is supplied to the water resulting in lowering it's temperature by some small amount?

Somewhere I read that temeprature difference between wet and dry thermometer goes up to 10°C, or more. It's sort of shocking to me, does that mean that water and air at differ by that large amount in a real environment? So they are basically never in a thermal equilibrium until all water evaporates? Wow...

I'm not really interested in math behind it, i just don't get what's going on in molecular, practical level.

 

[Buzz Bloom]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature