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What's the Deal with Windchill?
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February 11th, 2008
It’s really cold and windy here today, and I was wondering about how windchill works. Is it something that only affects people, or does it affect the physics of things too? For instance, would water freeze if the temperature was 35 degrees but the windchill was down to 25? What’s the algorithm used for calculating windchill, i.e. how does windspeed relate to windchill?
As I understand it, people feel colder when it’s windy because water evaporates off our skin faster, leading to a very high rate of evaporative cooling. (Like when you blow on your soup to cool it down). This makes it seem like water would freeze if the windchill was below freezing but the actual temperature was not, but that just doesn’t seem right to me.
Can anyone offer some insight?
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