Brief by Central Staff
Weather – April 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
The hot water supply at Central world headquarters was cut off — some pipes were frozen on the morning of March 3, when the outside thermometer read -15°F. Since our next-door neighbor had the same reading on his exterior thermometer that morning, that’s close enough to be more or less official.
In most other parts of the world, that would have been -26C. They use the Celsius thermometer (also known as centigrade). On it, 0° is the melting point of water, and 100° the boiling point (at sea level — it’s lower up here, on account of reduced atmospheric pressure).
The Fahrenheit scale we use is named for Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), who spent most of his career studying physics in the Netherlands. His thermometer started by setting 0° as the coldest he could get with an ice-salt mixture and 96° as the normal human body temperature. It was then refined so that there were 180 degrees between the normal water freezing and boiling points — 32° and 212° — which moved the body temperature to 98.6°, more or less.
There is, of course, a conversion formula: F=((9/5)xC)+32, or C=(F-32)x(5/9). At -40°, both scales are the same, and that is also close to the freezing point for mercury, the common ingredient in thermometers until a few years ago, when the authorities decided mercury was too toxic to be in such common use.
If you don’t like using negative numbers for temperatures (we have nothing against the numbers, even if we’re not fond of such temperatures), you could switch from Celsius to the Kelvin scale.
To a physicist, temperature is a measure of molecular motion, and there’s a point where there isn’t any (except for what’s required by the Uncertainty Principle, but we’ll ignore that here).
That point of no motion when everything is frozen solid is absolute zero, or -273°C. So to convert from Celsius to Kelvin, just add 273, and thus a comfortable room would be about 293°K or 20°C. The Rankine scale operates similarly, except with Fahrenheit, so absolute zero there is -460°, and our recent cold morning was 445°R.
There are, of course, other considerations than temperatures, such as the “wind chill factor.” The idea there is that a 20-mph wind combined with a 20° air temperature might have the same effect, in terms of frostbite and clothing needs, as -10° in still air.
That’s also the topic of much debate among scientists; some say it overstates heat loss even though there’s no general agreement on what would be more accurate.
In one of his books, David Lavender observed that in the Rocky Mountains, you can perform just about any kind of winter outdoor work, no matter what the air temperature, as long as you stay in the sun and out of the wind. That conforms to our experience.
And as for describing cold, we prefer to avoid numbers and listen for words: “colder than a well digger’s ass on a brass toilet seat on a Montana rig in the middle of January,” “so cold it freezes before it hits the ground,” “colder than a banker’s heart,” etc.
If you’ve heard any memorable (and printable) expressions for coldness, send them along, and we’ll print them next winter, when we’ll likely need them again.