HWS News
11 September 2025 • Alums • Research Warming Temperatures and Weaker Winds in Recent Decades are Reducing the Chill of Winters
Research co-authored by Professor of Geoscience Neil Laird finds that both average and extreme wind chill temperatures have warmed across most of North America.
An article published in American Meteorological Society Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology this summer was built off Hobart and William Smith honors research conducted in 2016. Undergraduate researchers Matthew Sinnenberg of the University at Albany and Cameron Crowell '26 teamed up with Professor of Geoscience Neil Laird and his former student to continue where the research left off nine years ago.
Macy Howarth Testani '16 now serves as a senior project manager of policy, analysis and research at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Her work with Laird in 2016, and published in 2017, examined spatiotemporal trends in extreme winter wind chill temperature (WCT) across Canada and the United States. The article published this summer, co-authored again by Laird, is the second journal article to stem from her honors work, Laird says.
WCT is a measure that describes how cold it feels outside when wind is combined with air temperature. It’s important because it affects so many parts of life — the economy, agriculture, and wildlife, but especially people’s health. Cold wind chill conditions can lead to hypothermia, frostbite and even death from heart and lung problems, Laird’s team explains in their research. In addition, weather is changing but not uniformly, which makes it essential to track how it changes across time in different places.
This 2025 article co-authored by the four researchers provides a new, large-scale analysis of how WCT and extreme WCT have shifted over time and across regions in both Canada and the U.S. It also looks at how much of those changes can be explained by rising temperatures and changing wind speeds.
Researchers
“We found that wind chill temperatures, and more substantially extreme wind chill temperatures, have warmed during a recent 40-year time period across nearly all areas of Canada and the United States, due to warming air temperatures combined with decreases in wind speed,” Laird says.
To look at how WCT and extreme WCT (the coldest 1% of values) have changed over time and across different regions, the group used hourly weather data from 133 stations in Canada and the United States, over 40 winters (from 1979-1980 to 2018-2019).
The biggest and most significant warming of average WCT happened in Alaska and the Canadian Northwest Territories, with increases of 13.2 to 16.4° C across the 40-year period. Significant warming also occurred along the East Coast of both countries and in the southeastern U.S.
The main reason for the warming, their research explains, was rising air temperatures. Decreasing wind speeds played a smaller role, the article explains.
The group’s research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Office of Academic and Faculty Affairs.
This spring, HWS was recognized for its commitment to and contributions in research, receiving the distinction on a notable list of “Research Colleges and Universities,” a designation established this year by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
