What's the Deal with Windchill?

1 Answer

Answer :

Wind chill is the effect of cooling the human body as a result of air motion. In the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of meteorology, they mention that two Antarctic explorers in the 1940’s found that changing temperatures and wind speeds affected the freezing point of 250 grams of water. Because wind chill refers to the rate of heat transfer from a warm body (human, water, dog, anything), wind chill does affect other things other than humans, as you suspected. There is a formula: T(wind chill) = 0.0817(3.71*V^0.5 + 5.81 – 0.25*V)(T-91.4) +91.4 where V is the speed of the wind in mph and T is the air temperature in F. This was developed by these explorers. What we tend to use wind chill for now is to let the public know that during certain conditions, exposure time is reduced before the effects of things like frost nip, bite and other cold related conditions will occur.

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