Wind Chill Factor

i have been using Weather Watcher for a while now and i never understood why there is no reading for wind chill. Wind chill is important part of the weather and can be the difference between 10 to 20 degrees and even more. Today is a summer day and currently 64 and overcast but the wind chill drops it to 58 degrees and that is information i have to get elsewhere, it would be so much better if you could get this right from Weather Watcher. In colder climates and during the colder months the wind chill factor is much more extreme and can drop the temperature by several degrees. You might have a winter day that is like 32 degrees and you might think “well its not that cold out” but when you get outside its freezing, thats because the wind chill factor drops the temperature to 10 degrees and at night sometimes -20 to -30 below. Basically, this is critical information that needs to be in Weather Watcher or Live preferably under the Current conditions would be nice. Quite frankly im surprised WW has come this far without it.

I also use a program called Weather1 that has pretty accurate readings for my area and it has Wind Chill factor but it is lacking in other areas. It just seems silly to me to have 2 programs to do the same thing when i could just have WW. :thumbright:

anyways thanks Singer, i hope you can get it in there.

Wind chill is there…Under the name of “Feels Like” temperature.

hmmm okay wasnt sure about that.

Currently, in WW shows a current temp of 62 and a feels like temp of the same 62 yet there is 10 mph wind from the east that is not accounted for. In this other program Weather1, it shows current temp at 63 and 9 mph wind from the east and a wind chill temp at 57 and if you know how to calculate wind chill this is fairly accurate.

i also noticed several days last winter that were extremely windy and cold and the “Feels Like” temp did not remotely match that of what the actual “Wind Chill” temp was doing, ever.

in any case, there seems to be a problem here. if Feels Like = Wind Chill like you say it does then it is not accurate at all.

Feels Like does take into account the wind chill factor and also the humidy factor. Currently here the Temp is 80 with a Feels Like of 83 with the Winds Calm because of the rain we’ve had and a Dew point of 68.

What version of WW are you running? And do the numbers you see on WW agree with those seen on Weather.com for your location?

The data displayed in WW is provided by The Weather Channel, so any inaccuracies are down to them.

Looking at mine, I have 57f/ feels like 57f with 5mph wind from the SW.

With WW Live which uses Weatherbug, I get 59f feels like 58f with 8mph wind from the SW which sounds about right.

Where does Weather1 get its data from?

By the way, the formulae for working out the windchill factor does not work above 40f or below -45f, anything outside this range will be inaccurate.

okay i see. thanks for clearing that up Biggles and Edp. to answer Weather1 gets the info courtesy of the National Weather Service (NWS) and Weather Underground along with several other sources for radar images etc. as mentioned in the about section of the program.

Windchill Temperature is only defined for temperatures at or below 50 degrees F and wind speeds above 3 mph. Bright sunshine may increase the wind chill temperature by 10 to 18 degrees F.
[size=2] http://www.weather.gov/om/windchill/[/size]

Note the impact of sunlight.

And into the mix we add:

The method for calculating wind chill has been controversial because experts disagree on whether it should be based on whole body cooling either while naked or while wearing appropriate clothing, or if it should be based instead on local cooling of the most exposed skin, such as the face. The internal thermal resistance is also a point of contention. It varies widely from person to person. Had the average value for the subjects been used, calculated WCET’s would be a few degrees more severe.
[size=2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill[/size]

So when you hear the term Wind Chill ask if the person stating the number is naked or clothed. :lol:

:lol: Nice one Ed… All-in-all not an exact science. Mind you, weather forecasting in general is not an exact science, certainly not in the UK. :roll: