
What Exactly Is Wind Chill and How Is It Calculated?
It's a fact of life in the part of the world we live in.
Bitterly cold weather.
Things are bad enough when you wake up to actual temperature readings of -15 to -20, but things really get dangerous when the wind kicks up and the wind chills kick in.
The numbers are almost too extreme to comprehend: -40 to -50 all over the Tri-State area, prompting the National Weather Service (NWS) to issue a Wind Chill Warning through the middle part of the day Saturday (December 24).

And while we may think we're the only part of the country that deals with wind chills, think again.
Currently, parts of at least a dozen states are dealing with wind chill warnings (marked in gray on the map).
From as far West as Washington to as far East as Pennsylvania and as far South as Texas.
So what are wind chills?
According to Wikipedia:
It is determined by iterating a model of skin temperature under various wind speeds and temperatures using standard engineering correlations of wind speed and heat transfer rate. Heat transfer was calculated for a bare face in wind, facing the wind, while walking into it at 1.4 meters per second (5.0 km/h; 3.1 mph).
The model corrects the officially measured wind speed to the wind speed at face height, assuming the person is in an open field.
And now the most important question: how are they calculated?
Time to brush up on your math...
According to this National Weather Service:
That certainly clears it up, doesn't it?
If you're looking for an easier way, just try the handy Wind Chill Calculator on the NWS website. All you do is put in the temp and wind speed and the calculator does all of the figuring.
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