To rephrase, if a rock sits outside in 10F weather with -10F windchill, is the rock’s surface temperature 10F or -10F?
In: 4775
Seeing a lot of great responses here; would like to offer another take from the perspective of near-body phase-transfer mechanics.
Your body is always heating up the air around you, creating an extremely thin layer of air just above your skin that is permanently warmer than the actual air. This is called your epiclimate; think of the area in front of a heater vs the rest of the room. Your body is necessarily a heater.
Therefore, when we experience outdoor weather, we feel that the temperature is much warmer than it actually is, because our bodies are providing a very thin, warmer barrier as we lose heat to the atmosphere.
Wind, however, removes this barrier and exposes us to the true ambient temperature. Technically, it’s not 10°F and feels like -10°F with wind chill; 10°F feels like 30°F without wind.
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