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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Anonymous 0 Comments

If you took 2 rocks from your house and one was in the wind and the other was protected from it, the rock in the wind would cool down to 10 F faster. That’s what wind chill is, speeding up the rate of heat transfer by moving the air. It’s the same principle as a convection oven (or air fryer). But they would both end up at 10 F eventually.

If something is wet then the drier the air is the more the wet thing cools off. This can make the wet thing cooler than the surrounding air as it takes heat to evaporate water. This is why your body can maintain a constant temperature even when the air is over 98 F. It is also true that this affect is greater when the wind is blowing as the water molecules are rapidly moved away allowing more to evaporate faster.

So back to the rocks, if they were wet they could temporarily get colder than the surrounding air until the rock dried off. (Note: it gets more complicated because you chose 10 F, but imagine you chose 35 F to simplify things by not worrying about freezing.) the amount and rate the water evaporates and causes cooling would also be affected by the wind.

In any event, moving the air simply affects the rate at which the heat is transferred, not the amount.

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