Of all the things I must do on the radio, weather is my least favourite. It’s rarely accurate and it’s full of guesses and subject to interpretation. Environment Canada, our government’s weather service, supplies us with our forecast and to top it all off the writing is terrible.
As an example, a forecast for the day will begin “becoming cloudy by noon.” So it’s up to us to look at it and realize, oh, it will be sunny in the morning and then cloud over. Why they don’t put it that way is a mystery.
The most contentious and frustrating part of the whole thing is the wind chill. Environment Canada explains that it’s the temperature that hits your skin when the wind is blowing on a cold day. It varies along with the speed of the wind. On a calm day, no wind chill value exists. But it could also be -13C and the wind chill at -25. The wind chill draws the most complaints and people are unkind when they express their displeasure with it. This is why you will often hear me say “Environment Canada says”. I want no part or ownership of their work!
I’ve tried using the wind chill in different ways to suggest that if you’re dressing someone for school, dress them for a minus whatever wind chill. Or I’ll say it feels like whatever temperature because of the brisk winds out of the blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter. People will tell me that if it feels like a certain temperature then we should say it IS that temperature. However, that’s incorrect as I’ve explained. For a while, EC meteorologists tried saying how long it would take exposed skin to freeze instead of giving a wind chill but that didn’t play well with people either. They’re determined to explain the wind chill because not only has government become our nanny, people expect them to nanny us! My goodness if outside workers worked despite a -25C wind chill because we didn’t tell them, and they got frostbite, well someone would be to blame. Goodness knows they couldn’t step outside and have their nose hairs freeze to determine it on their own!
The wind chill is here to stay. It only makes sense that the wind affects the temperature and it feels colder in an open, windy space than in a protected one. And we broadcasters will continue to deliver the wind chill because we are not the meteorologists. Environment Canada is the expert on weather on behalf of the government just like the Canadian Food Inspection Agency issues product recalls that we tell you about and so on. Their word is supposed to be gospel so if they want to start putting out a “frog shower likelihood index” you know we are also going to have to use it. It’s part of our mandate as renters of the public airwaves to share any information our nannies say is important to health and welfare. A century ago, news articles on winter sporting events also included death counts from spectators who succumbed to the cold. So now the nannies feel the wind chill will help us all bundle up properly and make it home without losing a digit or our lives and we are duty bound to follow their lead, like it or not.