If it’s 75 degrees but feels like 70 degrees outside, shouldn’t the real temperature also be 70?
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Your skin isn’t a calibrated thermometer.
What you “feel” is basically interpreted by the brain, and the brain gives you sensations that correspond to how easy or difficult it would be for your body to cool itself.
This is why 75 degrees but windy will feel cooler, because the wind evaporates some of your sweat and helps you cool down. Similarly, 75 and very humid will feel stifling, because your body can’t cool down through sweating.
This is why weather reports usually include temperature *and* humidity, and often also include “wind chill” or “feels like” information.
“Feels like” takes into account how fast your body would lose or gain heat. So if it’s 40 outside, but there’s a wind, it might ‘feel’ like 30 degrees. That doesn’t mean that water would freeze, it just means that you would lose heat from your body as fast as you would on a 30 degree day with no wind.
Humidity will also affect this. Cold, humid air will rob you of heat faster. Hot, humid air will keep your body from being able to shed heat (by sweat evaporating) as quickly.
IRL the air is one temperature. Wind and water in air change the way we feel it, even if the air doesn’t change temperature. Like wind cooling us even if the air isn’t that cold.
You don’t really feel a temperature. You feel the effect it has on your body temperature.
Your body is constantly generating heat, and it has a few ways of getting rid of excess heat. If it can’t get rid of heat fast enough, you feel warm. If heat is bleeding away too fast, you feel cold.
Part of bleeding away heat is that you heat up the air around you. As that air heats up, you decrease that temperature differential, so you hit some sort of equilibrium.
If there’s a lot of wind, then that air around you is going to get replaced much more frequently. You don’t really have a chance to reach an equilibrium, so you are losing heat as if the temperature was a few degrees cooler.
The “real” temperature is how fast the air molecules are vibrating.
The “feels like” is how fast you’ll gain/lose Temperature on your skin. Also how fast you’ll get heat stroke/frostbite if it’s in those ranges.
You don’t “feel” temperature.
The only thing humans can feel is heat flow. That’s why 70˚F water is “cooler” than air at the same temperature.
Sorry, evolution didn’t include a sense of temperature in humans.
The temperature listed on the weather report is the temperature of the air, which is essentially a measure of the average kinetic energy of the air molecules.
The “real feel” temperature takes into account factors that affect how hot or cold we feel. The humidity in the air affects how easily we cool our bodies through sweat. The wind speed changes the rate at which fresh air molecules can either give or take heat from our bodies. There is also radiation from the Sun that doesn’t get absorbed by the air, but does get absorbed by our bodies and warms us.
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