At daybreak today, the thermometer hit a record low for the date. It was 13 degrees below zero. That’s 83 degrees colder than enjoyable. The way I see it, at about 25 degrees, it is cold! After that it is just degrees of misery. When I was a kid, we didn’t have the wind chill factor or if we did, nobody talked about it. I think it is just an invention of the news media to sensationalize the weather. “Tomorrow morning’s wind chill will be -35 degrees below zero! At that temperature, your nose can freeze and fall off in less than a minute” Yes, I know it is either -35 degrees or 35 degrees below zero but -35 degrees below zero sounds so much colder. What ever happened to , “It will be cold and windy in the morning, bundle up.”
For those of you who live below the Mason-Dixon Line, I will try to describe what these temperatures feel like. I know, I know, wind chill is the “feels like” temperature but that is like saying the sweetness factor tells you how sweet something is. If you have never had sugar, you have no comparison.
The first thing you will notice when you step out into the sub-zero cold is that your nose hairs freeze. Perhaps we need a nose freeze factor measured in seconds to replace the wind-chill. We will be having a 3 second nose freeze factor in the morning. That means on the second breath, you will notice the inside of your nose is getting sticky as the moisture on your nose hairs starts to freeze and stick to the other freezing hairs. The next observation will be the squeaking snow or ice under-foot. Your footsteps are no longer silent. They squeak. It is a sound unlike any other but once you have experienced it, you never forget the sound. It is higher pitched than a squeaking old floor and the colder it is, the higher the pitch. After the squeak factor, you notice the hardness of the surface on which you walk. While it is true the density of the surface increases with the cold (you know, heat expands; cold contracts) the real difference is the freezing of the soles and inner-soles of your shoes. Even the padding between your joints loses its compression factor. This is why the cold is described as bone jarring cold. The last feeling you get in these arctic temperatures is the the lack of feeling in extremities. This is the numbness factor. It is determined by the insulation in your clothing. If you go out without a coat, you might have a 3 minute numbness factor. This factor would be actually two numbers because there is also a time factor for warming up when you return inside. So a 3-5 numbness factor would result in numbness after just 3 minutes outside without a coat and a 5 minute warm up time when you return inside.
Now that you know the standards, I can describe the weather I experienced this morning.