Its 33°F right now but it feels so cold that I really thought it was like 10° out. But a week ago I remember being outside and it felt pretty nice. I checked and the temperature was 36°F. It should feel the same shouldn’t it?
I also notice this happens when the season changes. When summer is ending and the temp starts to drop into the 60s it feels so cold but when winter is ending and it starts to go *up* into the 50s and 60s it practically feels like summer.
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How much sun is directly shining on your body and humidity play a very large part in how a temperature feels.
I use the app AccuWeather and it tells me the actual temperature with a “Feels Like” temperature next to it.
So for example the other day it was 8 Celsius but felt like -2 Celsius. This could be for a variety of reasons including wind chill
The way we feel temperature is how quickly it cools or warms our skin. This is not the same thing as the temperature of an object. High moisture levels makes air feel warmer, and small breezes makes air feel cooler. Often weather reports will include a “feels like” temperature to adjust for moisture.
But from what you mentioned, maybe you have just gotten used to hot or cold weather, and maybe dress as if it was still cold or warm, and thats why it feels a lot warmer or colder than what the weather report says.
Humidity, wind speed, and whether you’re getting direct sunlight vs clouds/shade can all have a huge impact on the rate heat exits from your body even when the temperature is constant.
Lower humidity = more rapid heat loss
Higher wind = more rapid heat loss
In the shade = more rapid heat loss
You can’t actually feel how hot something is. All you can feel is how hot it makes you.
This is why when you go down a plastic slide on the playground on a hot summer day the slide feels warm but the metal rivets feel super hot. They’re actually the same temperature, but the rivets can transmit that heat to you much better.
Heat can be transferred to you in a few ways. One is just by touching something hot, which is known as conduction. That’s what’s going on in the slide example. Different material properties can make this go faster or slower.
Another form of heat transfer is when something carrying heat moves around, typically a gas or liquid. On its own this doesn’t transfer heat to you, but moving air can quickly cycle out the layer of air next to your skin. On a cold day your skin warms up that layer (making your skin colder), then if the wind blows it away that layer is replaced by a fresh, cold layer for your skin to warm. This is why wind chill exists–at the same temperature you’ll tend to feel cooler when there’s wind.
A third form of heat transfer is when one body sends heat in the form of infrared radiation. This is how a toaster toasts bread and how the sun toasts you. If you’re being cooled by the air as you’re being warmed by the sun it’ll result in a warmer overall feel than if the sun was behind clouds or if it was just night.
Complicating all of this is evaporative cooling. When water evaporates it cools down. This is how sweat works to cool you. The rate at which you sweat (or are otherwise made wet) and the rate at which that sweat evaporates determines the magnitude of that effect. Still humid days will do little to allow sweat to evaporate, so the heat index will be high on those days. Dry windy days will quickly evaporate sweat and help to cool you off.
From there you’d look at biology. What feels pleasant is largely driven by the thermal balance of your body. You generate a good bit of heat just through your life processes, or some extra heat when exercising. Your body needs to get rid of that heat. However, your body also needs to stay warm so the various chemical reactions that make up life can proceed as desired, which means not shedding too much heat. An ideal heat flow balance will depend on how much heat your body is producing, so a person exercising at 65 F may find the temperature to be unpleasantly warm, while a person idle at 70F may find it to be cooler than they’d like.
And finally you can look at psychology. Biology can tell us what heat balance is “right,” but how unpleasant should other heat balances be? Someone who is used to the cold may not be bothered so much by a cold day, even though that weather is requiring them to burn some extra calories to stay warm.
Our bodies are internally heated, and then cooled by the air around it. The temperature of the air controls how quickly we can shed heat.
But beyond that, we also take in heat from the suns radiation. That is largely dependant on how straight of a line the sun has to is. If it’s morning/evening vs noon, or winter vs summer, the suns light goes through more atmosphere on its way to you, and so you take in less heat from it.
We get acclimated pretty quick.
We had a bit of a cold snap for two weeks. Twenties day, teens night and just grey, grey, grey. Today was low thirties and sunny and after having been so cold for two weeks the sun and thirties felt quite warm.
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