There’s the temp and then the “feels like” temp. If they are different, how does a thermometer read the real temp and not what it feels like, since it feels like the feels like temp?

Question

I know this title sounds crazy but I don’t know how to phrase my question better

In: 5716

Answer 1

Your nerve cells can’t directly sense temperature. Your nerves are sensing “heat flux” and your brain is interpreting it. Basically, it can tell “is heat flowing into my skin, or away from my skin?” and “how quickly is that heat flowing?”

Wind speed and humidity are two things that directly impact how quickly that heat flows. More wind means more air molecules are hitting your skin and transferring heat away from you more quickly. When it gets hot, you sweat and the evaporation of your sweat cools you down. The higher the humidity, the more slowly the sweat evaporates which means that the heat is transferring away from you more slowly.

Wind doesn’t effect the thermometer, because the thermometer gets to the same temperature as the surrounding air. All the wind in the world can hit it, but because they both are at the same temperature, no heat is getting transferred either way.

To give you the “feels like” temperature when it’s cold, they just measure the temperature, and measure the average wind speed, then look it up in a table that some scientists figured out back in the day.

Similarly, to give you the “feels like” temperature when it’s warm, you take the temperature and relative humidity, then look it up in a table.