The term wind chill was coined by the Antarctic explorer Paul A. Siple in his dissertation, “Adaptation of the Explorer to the Climate of Antarctica,” submitted in 1939. During their stay in Antarctica, Siple and his colleague, Charles F. Passel, conducted experiments on the time required to freeze 250 grams of water in a plastic cylinder placed outside in the wind. In 1945 they published their results, including a formula still used for computing wind chill:
where H is the wind chill in kilocalories per square meter per hour, ν is the wind speed in meters per second, and Tis the temperature in degrees Celsius. Siple and Passel assumed that uncovered skin would be at a temperature of 33°C, somewhat lower than the normal body temperature of 37°C. According to the formula, the skin cools at a rate proportional to the difference between skin and air temperatures. The proportionality constant depends on wind speed; it accounts for convective heat losses due to turbulent air motion around...
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References
Court, A., 1948. Wind chill, Am. Meteorol. Soc. Bull. 29(10), 487–493.
Schlatter, T. W., 1981. Weather queries, Weatherwise 34(6), 266–267.
Steadman, R. G., 1971. Indices of wind chill of clothed persons, Jour. Appl. Meteorol. 10(4), 674–683.
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© 1987 Van Nostrand Reinhold
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Schlatter, T.W. (1987). Wind chill . In: Climatology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30749-4_198
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30749-4_198
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