What People Are Misunderstanding This Week: “It Might Be Too Cold for Snow” and Other Winter Myths

With the recent powerful winter storm sweeping across much of the country, now is a good time to address some myths and misinformation about the cold and winter weather. You may be freezing, but that’s no excuse for being cold and ignorant.

Myth: A severe blizzard is a heavy snowfall.

Technically, for a storm to be considered a blizzard , it must meet the following conditions: wind speeds must exceed 35 mph, and visibility must be low (less than 1/4 mile) for at least three hours. So, a blizzard can develop from a snowstorm even if no snow falls, and a huge amount of snow can accumulate, but it will never technically be a blizzard. (However, if you’re trapped in one, whether it’s a snowstorm or a blizzard likely won’t matter to you.)

Myth: It can be too cold for snow to fall.

There are some nuances here. Extremely cold air contains very little moisture, but it must be very cold. According to Matt Peroutka , a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, “Once ground-level air temperatures drop below about -10 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius), snowfall becomes unlikely in most places.”

But something like snow is still possible. “There’s really no temperature too low for ice crystals to form and settle on the surface,” explains Fred W. Decker of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University in an interview with Scientific American . “However, such a collection of ice needles isn’t typically considered ‘snow’; in the Arctic, for example, we might talk about ice fog.”

Myth: Most body heat is lost through the head.

I’ve debunked this myth in detail, but the gist is that not wearing a hat results in approximately 7-10 percent heat loss, as the head accounts for approximately 7-10 percent of the body’s total surface area. On the other hand, how cold you feel is subjective, and not wearing a hat in cold weather will likely make you feel colder, even if you’re not actually losing much body heat. Bottom line: wear a hat to stay warm in cold weather, or don’t wear a hat to prove you’re not losing too much heat.

Myth: Alcohol warms you up in cold weather.

In an emergency, drinking brandy from a barrel hanging around the neck of a rescued St. Bernard is a bad idea. Alcohol warms by dilating blood vessels, but it actually lowers body temperature by drawing heat away from the core, increasing the risk of hypothermia. However, as with the “heat loss through the head” myth, drinking alcohol often warms , so if you’re safe on your veranda and craving a hot drink, it seems to “warm you up.” Incidentally…

Myth: Hot drinks warm you up faster than cold ones.

It’s probably impossible to drink a liquid hot enough to raise your body temperature. On the other hand (and this is the third time in a row), a warm drink can warm you up, and that’s often what you want, even if it doesn’t actually warm you up . So, if you’re sitting on the veranda and want to drink some hot tea to feel cozy, go ahead.

Traditional winter signs that don’t actually predict anything.

There’s a lot to learn from folk traditions, but frankly, they’re also full of mistakes. Here are a few questionable folk sayings about winter:

• Thick corn cobs, onion and apple skins signify a cold winter : the thickness of the outer skin of vegetables reflects the conditions in which they were grown; it does not predict the future.

• Squirrels with very bushy tails indicate a cold winter: as with vegetables, the thickness of a squirrel’s tail usually depends on how healthy and well-fed it was before winter. More nuts in the summer means stronger squirrels.

• You can predict the severity of winter by looking at a caterpillar’s tail : the more extensive the rusty-brown stripes on a woolly caterpillar, the milder the coming winter is said to be. The more black, the harsher the winter. The problem is that to test this claim, you’d need to examine a lot of caterpillars, because some will have wider brown stripes, while others won’t. According to Mike Peters, an entomologist at the University of Massachusetts, in The Farmers’ Almanac , “There’s some evidence that the number of brown hairs is related to the caterpillar’s age—in other words, how late it began developing in the spring. [The stripe] does indicate a harsh winter or an early spring. The only thing is… it tells you something about the previous year.”

Strange legend: This winter storm was man-made and intended to freeze a giant sea serpent.

A theory is circulating in the strangest corners of the internet that the biblical monster Leviathan has awakened , and that we created a winter storm to freeze it in place . As evidence, they cite satellite images that appear to depict a giant, serpentine silhouette in the Atlantic Ocean. As much as I would welcome the biblical sea monster emerging from the ocean to take revenge—long live Leviathan!—it’s unlikely. I’m 99.9% sure (but still hoping) that these were natural geological formations that Google Earth mistook for a sea monster due to pareidolia—the human tendency to see patterns in random data. Besides, we can’t control winter storms any more than we can control hurricanes , even if we’re about to be eaten by a sea monster.

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