Does wind chill only affect living creatures?

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To rephrase, if a rock sits outside in 10F weather with -10F windchill, is the rock’s surface temperature 10F or -10F?

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Windchill affects everything that’s not the same temperature as the wind (and/everything that is wet/damp).

Wind increases the rate at which heat is transferred, however heat is only transferred when there’s a temperature gradient. A rock that’s been sitting outside and is exactly the same temperature as the air won’t “feel” cold.

So the rock in your example would be 10F.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Windchill is what temperature it “feels” like on bare skin.

Objects do not experience wind chill.

Wind will cool things down faster because when there is wind the heated air is carried away and replaced with cooler air.

No amount of wind will cool down an object below ambient temperature – unless there is evaporative cooling taking place.

The rock would be at 10F.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If the rock is warm, it will cool faster in windy -10 then in a non windy 10. The moving air will likely move heat away from the rock faster. If the rock is already 10 it will make no difference. A living creature will rarely if ever be as cold as the outside temperature, even cold blooded creatures try to warm up so will always be chilled harder by wind.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A damp non-living can experience the effects of wind chill, as the wind is both accelerating heat transfer by forced convection and evaporative cooling. That’s how wind chill is measured, a thermometer with a damp bulb.

Anonymous 0 Comments

For example of you love somewhere cold, try to park with your radiator and engine facing away from the wind. It will give an added bonus chance of starting lol

Anonymous 0 Comments

Humans are very hot, about 100 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 centigrade. When outside in normal conditions your body loses heat constantly.

You feel wind chill because, as a very hot object, the faster fluids are moving around you (the air) the faster you lose heat. Moving air makes it ‘feel’ colder then it is (the wind chill factor).

It’s no colder though. Were you to die and stop producing heat while in an area with a high wind chill factor your body would cool to the ambient ‘real’ temperature, not the wind chill factor temperature. The same is true for objects outside. Wind makes them cool down to the ambient temperature faster, but won’t cool them bellow ambient.

This is the same way a convection oven or air fryer works. By having the air move quickly around the food heat moves into it quickly, but the air is no hotter then in a normal oven.

Edit: Food, not foot. Feet don’t belong in air fryers.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Will water freeze if the outside temperature is not below freezing, if the windchill brings the overall “feels like” to below freezing?

You may have already basically said the answer but I didn’t pick up the understanding.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Windchill usually means the temperature you feel on bare skin. So only living humans’ exposed skin counts, nothing else. It is “qualia-based”: by what your brain makes of it.

Animals would already experience it differently due to fur and another metabolism. For rocks or any dead material it makes even less sense. However, if you would use a thermometer on a dry rock that had time to reach ambient temperature, you would find that it has the true temperature (10°F in your example). If it was/is wet, then evaporation might get it a bit colder.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Wind chill is how cold it FEELS

If there’s no wind, you wont be feeling the 10F even on bare skin, because your body warms itself.

With wind, you will cool down faster because wind will transfer that cold air faster

Anonymous 0 Comments

Wind blows the heat away.

You are warmer that the wind and get cold faster.

The rock already is cold and thus doesn’t get colder by the wind