There are only three months out of the year that there hasn’t ever been a wind chill value reported. Of those 23 days, three will be below -30 and almost one of them hit will hit -40. In Toronto, we will average roughly 23 days each year where we hit wind chill values below -20. The air temperature at the time was -51 Degrees and the winds were howling at 56 km/h. The coldest wind chill ever recorded in Canada is -78 in Kugaaruk, Nunavut on January 13, 1975. The chart below shows some of the signs for hypothermia: Your body can shut down after working too hard to keep your core temperature up. There are a few signs of hypothermia and it is something that can be incredibly dangerous if you don’t seek medical attention quickly enough. See the chart below for how quickly unprotected skin can freeze: Your ears, nose, fingers and toes are the most likely spots to get frost bite. ![]() This is basically when your skin and the tissue below it freeze, and can be permanently damaged. So make sure you are taking precautions to ensure that the heat is not escaping off of them too.įrost bite can occur in a matter of minutes on some of the most extreme wind chill days that we see here in Toronto. This mainly is an issue for exposed skin on humans, but pets too can feel the effects. Stronger wind passing over exposed skin can cause cold-related health issues to settle in faster. Your body then has to spend more energy to try and warm yourself and the core body temperatures can start to drop. If you are wet or wearing wet clothing or shoes, you will be even colder, even faster. When it is windy that layer is blown away from your body and you feel accelerated effects from the cold on your body’s temperature. On a calmer day, the heat produced by your body will create a small bubble of warm air around you that acts as a barrier between the cold air and your skin. Wind chill doesn’t impact buildings or your car’s battery, but it does impact you and your family. We use wind chill as a tool to gauge health risks on people and pets, instead of it being a true observed measurement. Wind chill is a calculation that combines air temperatures, the wind speed and how these together will affect your body’s ability to keep warm. Therefore, when stating what the wind chill is, it is merely the numerical value without a symbol. Wind chill is a calculated value and does not have the same units of measurement as the temperatures scale. One of the other common mistakes I notice floating around on social media is the usage of the degree symbol when someone is talking about the wind chill. ![]() On that day, we also saw our lowest wind chill value of -45 and that was only for one hour. The coldest temperature that has ever been recorded at the Toronto Pearson Airport is -31.3 C on January 4, 1981. I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard that it was -40 C this morning or that it is going to get down to -40 C this weekend. We need to talk about wind chill and get one thing straight: Temperature and wind chill are not the same thing!
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