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It's annoying when, in late fall, slumped-shouldered TV weatherfolk announce the coming of something that's been coming since before Indigenous tribes settled here 15,000 years ago. "Snow's in the forecast," they warn (some even call a looming 2-inch fall "a storm").

They're flat-out giddy when temps drop to the 30s so they can add a "feels like" number that, with wind, can be notably lower. It's ecstasy when the number gets to minus degrees, and too often it's the only reported number.

But "feels like" temps are bogus. In reality it's windchill that narrowly relates only to how long exposed skin gets to frostbite. Humans cannot feel a temperature in degrees; it's cold, or colder, or dang cold.

Even the formula for "windchill" has changed over time due to continuing scientific tension over how it should be calculated.

Windchill is temperature combined with wind. The big problem is that wind isn't steady: There are gusts, with speed altered by trees or buildings. Wind's constant is change.

Frostbite comes in low temperatures combined with exposure time, as in sitting in a stadium with toes bound in boots that pinch blood flow. But we're Minnesotans who know to bundle up and move when outside in winter. "Feels like" (windchill) has so many variables that it's meaningless.

As one writer said, if you're standing in a bathing suit in a field with no windbreak, windchill has meaning.

"This romance with windchill is just hype so TV weather people can scare you," says Edwin Kessler, former director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

But southern TV often reports northern temps in "feels like," so pardon your friends in warm climes when they call and ask how minus 30 is survivable.

Easy. We don't go outside in a bathing suit.

Ron Way lives in Minneapolis. He's at ron-way@comcast.net.