Windchill used to be a little like the weather itself. Everybody complained about it, but nobody did anything. Adopted by the U.S. National Weather Service in 1973, the wind-chill temperature was supposed to reflect the cooling effect of strong winds on cold days. But somehow it never seemed to reflect reality.
Environmental physicist Randall Osczevski of Defense R&D Canada questioned the index after finding that windchills in Toronto rivaled the still-air temperatures he'd experienced doing field research in the Arctic. "It didn't feel like -40 degrees to me, and I'd lived at a place where it became -40 without the wind," he recalls. Biomedical engineer Maurice Bluestein of Indiana University-Purdue University became a doubter when wind-chill estimates reached 65 degrees below zero in Indianapolis. Bluestein started shoveling snow and was soon shucking clothes to keep from overheating. "But they'd said, 'Don't go out, or the wind will freeze the skin ...
