A wind chill advisory for Wednesday night and the following morning has Orange Schools operating on a two-hour delay on Thursday.

“The wind chill advisory is going to go into effect tonight at midnight,” said National Weather Service Meteorologist Katie Dedeaux on Wednesday, “and it’s going to stay in effect until tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.

“We are expecting lows to bottom out in the 10-to-11-degree range tonight. With the winds factored into that, the wind-chill value – which is what your skin feels the temperature is – is going to be around zero degrees. And then tomorrow, it’s going to stay below freezing.

“Throughout the day, we’re only expecting highs to get into the mid-to-upper 20s. So it’s going to be an extended period of time to where we stay below freezing.”

Dedeaux added that projections regarding possible snow flurries in central North Carolina haven’t come true as of late Wednesday afternoon.

“It’s looking like that’s not going to occur,” she said. “We haven’t gotten any reports of anything. We’ve had some returns on the radar, but we have got no ground truth, or reports from our people out there that there are, indeed, any snow flurries.”

The National Weather Service advises people to stay inside as much as possible, and to avoid exposing skin to the cold air for too long.

Don’t leave pets outside, and make sure to protect your pipes from freezing.

Dedeaux cautions people to be careful when using space heaters, and to unplug them whenever they’re left unattended.