What exactly is a wind chill temperature?
When Siple and Passel did their research, they weren’t really trying to develop a temperature equivalent that alarmist weathermen could trot out. In fact, their original measure expressed the heat loss in a more esoteric unit: watts per square meter. The idea of expressing wind chills in terms of an equivalent temperature—the “feels like” language we hear on the news—didn’t start until the 1970s. Before the switch, weathermen would report the wind chill in three- or four-digit numbers which were a bit difficult for viewers to wrap their heads around. American weathermen started translating wind chills into temperature equivalents in order to give viewers a more familiar term.
