By For anyone who has spent a winter in northeastern South Dakota, the phrase wind chill warning is too familiar.
Beginning Oct. 1, however, the National Weather Service changed the lingo when it comes to cold weather announcements, dumping the term wind chill.
A wind chill watch will now be called an extreme cold watch, and a wind chill warning is now an extreme cold warning. They will be issued when dangerously cold air, with or without wind, is in the forecast.
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NWS Meteorologist Renee Wise, who works in the Aberdeen office, said the changes have been in the works for a while.
“The primary reason for the change is that sometimes we can have our coldest mornings when we have no wind.” Wise said. “The old criteria was that you had to have at least 5 mph of winds to issue a wind chill advisory or warning.”
NWS made the changes hoping to clarify that frigidly cold temperatures can be dangerous even without wind. Using wind chill has also been replaced by “feels-like temperature” in recent years.
The temperatures at which advisories, watches and warnings will be issued have also shifted. The criteria used to be the same for all of northeastern South Dakota, but now it varies by county
For Brown County, an extreme cold watch or warning will be issued when the feels-like temperature is expected to hit 40 below. The threshold used to be 35 below.
A wind chill advisory is now a cold weather advisory. A cold weather advisory will be issued when the feels-like temperature is expected to be 30 below instead of 25 below.
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Hard freeze watch and hard freeze warning are also being eliminated in favor of the simpler freeze watch and freeze warning.
If the “Old Farmer’s Almanac” is accurate, there should be fewer cold weather warnings than usual in the months to come. The almanac, which began in 1792, making it the oldest continuously published periodical in North America, is predicting a mild winter for the Upper Midwest, including northeastern South Dakota. It says temperatures will be warmer than normal and snowfall totals below normal.
-Scott Waltman of The Aberdeen Insider contributed to this report.