Makes sense - it’s friggin’ cold here like 4-5 months out of the year. The part that really blew my mind is that it only dates back to 2001. I was almost an adult then, and I don’t ever remember it not being a thing.
I remember am radio reporting windchills like this, when I was a child. “Today’s high is -26C with a windchill of 2200. This means frostbite in three minutes on exposed skin, so bundle up!” And my parents had a chart that converted windchill values to frostbite times.
Going further back, I remember when that watts per square metre (the 2200 in your weather report) was introduced as a replacement for whatever windchill calculations they were using before.
One thing many people I know get wrong about windchill is the effect on needing to plug in a vehicle’s block heater. If you normally are good down to -20C on a calm day, you’ll also be good down to -20C on a windy day, despite windchill being far below -20. The engine will cool faster, not farther.
No matter how fast the engine cools off, it still won’t get any colder than the actual air temperature. Of course, that also means that if you are good for 4 hours at -20C on a calm day, starting with a hot engine, then adding wind means you might only be good for 2-3 hours.
Yeah, the wind can never chill something below ambient temperature. It can only pull heat from the warmer object to the cooler object. If both are the same temperature, then there’s no transfer of heat. More wind only makes the transfer happen more quickly.
Glad you understand this, I feel validated. lol. I had an argument with my coworkers about this in the mid 90s. They said overnight -10 or like -30 with windchill so they were covering their engines with blankets. (No block heater) I tried to explain their cold engine is not producing heat, so -10 is all the engine will “Feel”, and the wind will not make the engine -30.
I think they are meaning 2001 was when it was standardized internationally by Canada’s work on it. We definitely had windchill warnings when i was a kid in 80s and 90s, but not based on a standard measuring system
Okay, thanks for that. I thought I was losing my mind.
aren’t we also responsible for DST
If we are, we made a terrible mistake! ;)
At first I thought they were referring to time zones. Time zones were an invention by a Canadian. But turns out the first two cities in the world to have DST were in Canada. However, DST was proposed before then by multiple different people, so I am not sure one can say it was a Canadian invention. After the two Canadian cities, it wasn’t until Germany in WWI that any nation had DST nationally. Other nations soon followed.
