How come wind cools you down, since it’s literally moving atoms, hitting your skin, creating kinetic energy?

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How come wind cools you down, since it’s literally moving atoms, hitting your skin, creating kinetic energy?

In: Physics

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most of the time, the wind is lower temperature than you are. So, although it has kinetic energy, it’s more likely to *get* kinetic energy from you, not give it.

When the wind is hotter than you, you still get evaporation cooling, like /u/slaax976 discusses in their comment.

If the wind gets fast enough then the directed kinetic energy in it can become a bigger contributor than the random thermal motion…that’s why things heat up when you go *really* fast (like supersonic). This is called “total temperature” or “stagnation temperature” and it can be hundreds or thousands of degrees higher than the ambient temperature (“static temperature”). But it’s so fast that it’s effect is negligible at normal wind speeds that we experience.

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