Living in the Northland we know all too well about below freezing temperatures right? How about windchill? I’ve asked a couple meteorologist friends to explain windchill to me, but when they start tossin those four syllable words at the Rayman my eyes start to glaze over ya know? I found this article easy to understand (no four syllable words)!
Let’s answer these and some of the other pressing questions about the ubiquitous winter statistic.
1. Why does wind make us feel cold?
When the wind blows across the exposed surface of our skin, it draws heat away from our bodies. When the wind picks up speed, it draws more heat away, so if your skin is exposed to the wind, your body will cool more quickly than it would have on a still day.
2. Who came up with the idea of calculating wind chills?
American explorer and geographer Paul Siple and his fellow explorer Charles Passel made the first breakthroughs in wind chill research while on an expedition in the Antarctic in 1940.
Siple and Passel suspended bottles of water outside a hut at their base station and measured how long it took the water to freeze under various wind conditions. After taking hundreds of these readings, the pair had a good idea of how rapidly heat was lost at different wind speeds.