if we have same tempature water and air, why does the water feel colder to the air when we go for a swim for example?

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if we have same tempature water and air, why does the water feel colder to the air when we go for a swim for example?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Water transfers heat faster than air does. Your skin feeling hot or cold, is more about the rate of heat transfer than it is the temperature itself. So jumping in cold water quickly draws a ton of heat out of your skin, making you feel a lot colder than in air.

Anonymous 0 Comments

We usually don’t have the same temperature water of air, if you’re talking about any natural bodies of water. But like the other person has said, water transfers heat faster

Anonymous 0 Comments

The cold feeling is the water taking your heat away with every interaction the molecules in the water have with your body. The air is a lot less dense and the molecules have a lot less interaction with your body than being submerged in a fluid like water. That’s why it is also colder at the top of mount Everest than at see level, less air molecules per unit of volume at that altitude.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is because water [absorbs heat](https://www.freedrinkingwater.com/water_quality/water-science/j-7-can-water-absorb-heat-better-than-most-substances.htm) faster than air.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Our nerves don’t actually sense the temperature of our surroundings. They are embedded in our flesh so technically they measure the temperature of our flesh, or more precisely the *change* in temperature of our flesh.

The speed of heat transfer varies depending on the difference in temperature between two objects; touching a hot stove for example will transfer heat into you much more quickly than one which is merely slightly warm. So our bodies recognize the temperature outside our flesh by gauging how quickly heat is transferred to or from the flesh in which the nerves reside.

Water has a much higher thermal conductivity than air (0.6 vs 0.025 W/(m·K)) which is to say that heat transfers to and from water much more easily than via air. Air is a great insulator which is why we use fluffy things as insulation, as they trap air which doesn’t conduct the heat very well.

So when you touch water heat leaves your body much more quickly than with air at the same temperature and your nerves will register this precipitous heat loss as implying a colder temperature. This phenomenon is the same as with touching metals as they tend to have high thermal conductivity, meaning metals will feel cooler despite being the same temperature as ambient.

Anonymous 0 Comments

temperature and heat are not the same thing

heat your oven to 400 degrees and put a sheet of tin foil and a ceramic casserole dish in it

wait 30 minutes and take out the foil with your bare hands. Toasty, maybe burns a little bit, but just little bit.

then grab the casserole dish with both hands. After you get back from the ER and clean up the broken dish you dropped because it WAS SO DAMN HOT, consider:

both items were 400 degrees. But the tinfoil was thin and did not have much mass so it did not contain that much heat energy. The casserole dish is ceramic is dense and heavy and can contain a lot more heat energy

likewise water is denser than air and can contain more heat energy at the same temperature

conversely, water can also absorb a lot more heat energy than air at the same temperature

Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine a volume of some material as a “lattice” of atoms, each one with protons, neutrons and electrons. In water, atoms are more packed together than on air. When these packaged atoms touch your skin, your skin sees more atoms per area than air.

The vibration of your skin atoms (and atoms always vibrate – unless you bring them to absolute zero) touch the lattice of atoms of water and make them vibrate. This vibration makes your surface atoms to lose energy and you start to feel cold. The column of atoms on your skin behind the surface ones, start to transfer energy to the surface ones that are now colder and the process repeats deeper on your skin lattice. It is like your skin is now the whole volume of water and skin and this creates a chain reaction, as your body tries to heat the whole thing. Because the volume is too big for the body to heat to the normal body temperature, that means that your body starts to lose the war and your temperature drops.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Late in the summer, months of warm weathsr have heated to water enough that at night, the water is actually warmer than the air.