mister moose
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- Oct 11, 2007
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Correct. Many people get confused on the whole "Wind chill" concept.
Wind chill is an attempt to correlate the increased cold feeling that wind gives. Wind makes it feel colder because the moving air disturbs and moves the boundary layer against your skin or clothing. The moving air increases the rate of heat loss from you to the air. That increased rate of heat loss makes it feel colder, it is not actually colder.
If it is 40 degrees out, and blowing 30 mph, the effective wind chill is 28 degrees. That means it 'feels' the same as 28 degrees with zero wind, but it is important to note that nothing about 28 degrees will ever happen to you. You can never get frostbite at 40 degrees air temp, no matter how high the wind, no matter how low the wind chill. You can of course get frostbite at 28 degrees with no wind. As previously stated, wind chill expresses the increased rate of heat loss, not any temperature, or temperature change due to wind. Nothing ever cools below ambient temperature because of wind chill.
(Arm chair scientists, don't confuse adiabatic cooling with wind chill in the above statement)
Many physical properties change as temperature decreases. Conductance, elasticity, brittleness, viscosity, density, volume, and many other properties change. These changes are a function of the real, actual temperature, no matter what the wind chill or heat index is.
Having driven a car in 40 below, I can tell you that zero or 10 below is nothing comparatively. Real changes happen to just about everything - windshields, tires, lubricants, bearings, all become vulnerable in ways we aren't used to. I can think of several things that would contribute to mechanical failures due to below zero temps, but nothing that a ski lift designed to operate in sub-zero temperatures shouldn't be able to normally handle.
