MSNBC knows. It’s not the famous 1967 NFL “Ice Bowl” title game, at which the temperature was -13F. No, it was the 1981 AFC Championship game, at -9F.
Howzat? It was the wind chill. At the 1981 game this was calculated at -59, whereas it was estimated to be -48 in the 1967 game.
Apparently, the folks at MSNBC missed the definition of wind chill: “The temperature of windless air that would have the same effect on exposed human skin as a given combination of wind speed and air temperature.”
I’ll wager there was precious little exposed skin in either of those games. And that - in Green Bay at least - real men don’t resort to some effete exaggeration to characterize their weather.
It’s kind of a ridiculous assertion to say that even people covered by jackets and such don’t experience wind chill because the wind isn’t directly on their exposed skin. Otherwise, people would be able to walk around in the winter in some places with just wind breakers. If you want to argue that since the wind chill wasn’t recorded at the time, there’s no way to tell definitively then I can get behind that. But based on what you said it seems to me that you’ve never been somewhere cold when the wind is blowing like crazy.
It would certainly be possible to come up with a formula to characterize the effect of wind and cold on a clothed person. It’s equally certain that such a formula would differ from the one that applies to bare skin.
Unless minus 40 with 25kt winds qualifies, I can only offer 3 winters spent in central NH.
Many players at last night’s NYG/GB game were indeed in short sleeves. And everybody (players, coaches, referrees, staff, & fans) had exposed faces.
Clearly there’s a huge difference in the whole-body effect between being exposed to -20 wind chill with just an exposed face versus buck naked. But at the same time, there’s no difference in the effect on your face.
ISTR the NWS issued a revision to the wind chill formula a few years ago which had the effect of reducing the numerical effect. e.g. (made-up WAG) -20F & 20 knots of wind was -40 wind chill in the old scale & -30 in the new scale. The first year the various weather popularizers went nuts because they were no longer able to quote such exaggerated numbers. Xema’s right, the current measure is very flawed and useful mostly for making weather more scary so the media can sell more cars or whatever.
The right answer is for people, ie. us, to recognize that you need to consider temperature, wind, humidity, sunlight & duration in deciding what to wear. You can’t reduce that to a single number. If you’re oudoors but sheltered from the wind, then wind chill is meaningless.
If all that’s too hard, move to Florida or Arizona where you can hear the whining about the heat index instead.
In fact, when the news reader mentions windchill I often ask the screen: “Well, what’s the heat index then?” It is calculable & will be slightly higher than the ambient temperature.
Ditto for windchill in AZ in August. There is a value, and it is a lower number than the ambient temperature. But for some reason the newsreaders never mention it. Apparently it isn’t exciting enough.
Acc to the commentators, last night’s game (-4 degrees F, -20 wind chill) was the third coldest in NFL history. The Freezer Bowl (-9 degrees F, -23 degree wind chill) was the the second coldest, and the New Year’s Eve 1967 Green Bay/Dallas game was the coldest, clocking in at -13 degrees, -48 degree wind chill.
Sorry Xema, I must have had my bitchy flakes for breakfast yesterday morning. I misread your post. But now that I understand what you were saying, wouldn’t it be colder per windchill no matter how people were dressed? Sure the people bundled would be affected less, but someone in a snowsuit on a -30 windchill day will feel colder than on a -20 windchill day. Maybe if the base temperatures were more extreme, like one starts at -3 and the other starts at -25, and the windchill brings them both to around -40, I can see that the -25 would be much colder, even if the -3 plus windchill is a few degress “colder.”
Oh, and Lamar, there are other mountains in NH that get freaking cold, albeit without the world-record windspeed of Washington. Franconia notch, for example.
