My sunburned sensitive skin feels better when a breeze comes on a summer afternoon. Do these harmful UV waves move from the wind, and defer their harm temporarily? Or does the wind just feel better compared to the strong sun beating on me.
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Your skin doesn’t directly feel UV. You feel the infrared heating your skin up. The wind draws water vapor away, allowing more of your sweat to evaporate, cooling you down.
You feel the heat of the sun heating your skin. The breeze is moving air past your skin, thus cooling through convection. Same way when you sit infront of a fan to cool down.
The UV is unaffected by the wind.
Edit: grammer
Wind does not have an effect on UV rays. You are not feeling UV rays hitting your skin separate from all other light. What you feel is all the light light heating you up.
When the air around you is cooler than your skin temperature the air cools you down and at the same time you heat up the air. A breeze will remove a bit of warmer air around you with cooler air and as a result, you feel cooler.
Another effect is water vapor. If the air is not very saturated with moisture you can cool down your body by sweating. When you sweat water on your skin evaporates and it requires energy, the energy it was taken from the thermal energy of your skin and you cool down. When water evaporates the humidity of the air around you increase, and the rate at which water evaporates depends on the moisture level in the air. A breeze will replace moister air around you with dryer air and as a result, sweat evaporates faster and you get cooler.
So how it feels when there is a breeze out in the sun has nothing to do with any change to UV radiation it is just a question of how fast you can lose heat to the air.
I tend to be sunburned more if there is a breeze compared to no breeze. That is because I can spend more time out in the sun and it is easy to forget about protection from the sunlight.
No. Wind can’t “blow” light. Your skin just feels cooler because the wind is moving cool air across your. It’s exactly the same as when you feel cool because of the wind but don’t have a sunburn, you just notice it more because the burn has made your skin more sensitive.
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