why does it sometimes show the temperature outside is 5° but Feels like 1°. Isn’t the actual temperature supposed to be what it’s feeling like? What’s the whole purpose of having that 5° there then
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Two examples:
– Your body is constantly radiating heat. So if you stand still in a room for an hour, the air around you will be a bit warmer than the air on the other side of the room. If it’s windy, though, the wind will carry that warm air away from you. Therefore, if it’s windy, it feels colder than it actually is, because you won’t benefit from your own radiated heat warming the space around you.
– When it’s hot, you sweat. The moisture evaporates into the air. Evaporation is an endothermic reaction: turning the liquid sweat into vapor consumes heat from the environment, making your skin feel cooler, that’s the purpose of sweat. Cools you down. But if the humidity is high (lots of water vapor already in the air), evaporation doesn’t work as well, so sweating won’t cool you down as much. Therefore, if it’s humid (and hot enough to make you sweat), it feels hotter than it actually is.
Thermometers don’t radiate heat or sweat, so they don’t experience either of those situations. They just report the actual temperature of the air they’re in. The “feels like” temperature is an estimate that tries to take into account how things like wind and humidity would affect temperature for a human. A 100-degree day with still, humid air feels a lot more suffocating than a 100-degree day with a dry breeze.
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