A question for you mechanical E's out there: while flipping through our ASME steam table book, we noticed that the speed of sound for water increases as temperature increases for a fixed pressure. This seems counter intuitive, because you would think that as temperature increases, density would decrease and thus speed of sound decrease. But this is not the case. What is the physical cause of this?

Damn. I would have thought the same thing!

The same thing happens to the speed of sound in air..

snip[As a very general proposition the speed of a traveling wave is proportional to the square root of an (elastic property divided by an inertial property). In the case of air and other media where the elastic property or springiness is described by a bulk modulus (change in volume per unit volume for a given stress) and the inertial property is the density (mass per unit volume) the velocity is proportional to the square root of the bulk modulus over the density. As the temperature of air increases the density decreases so the denominator of the expression for the velocity decreases, causing an increase in velocity.[snip]

nm everyone answers faster than me today

Quoted: The same thing happens to the speed of sound in air.. snip[As a very general proposition the speed of a traveling wave is proportional to the square root of an (elastic property divided by an inertial property). In the case of air and other media where the elastic property or springiness is described by a bulk modulus (change in volume per unit volume for a given stress) and the inertial property is the density (mass per unit volume) the velocity is proportional to the square root of the bulk modulus over the density. As the temperature of air increases the density decreases so the denominator of the expression for the velocity decreases, causing an increase in velocity.[snip]

bingo, thx