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Beaufort scale

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Beaufort scale, a scale of wind wind, flow of air relative to the earth's surface. A wind is named according to the point of the compass from which it blows, e.g., a wind blowing from the north is a north wind.
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 velocity devised (c.1805) by Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort of the British navy. An adaptation of Beaufort's scale is used by the U.S. National Weather Service; it employs a scale from 0 to 12, representing calm, light air, light breeze, gentle breeze, moderate breeze, fresh breeze, strong breeze, moderate gale, fresh gale, strong gale, whole gale, storm, hurricane. Zero (calm) is a wind velocity of less than 1 mi (1.6 km) per hr, and 12 (hurricane) represents a velocity of more than 74 mi (119 km) per hr.

Beaufort's original scale was later correlated to wind speed in two different ways. The U.S. and British scale is for winds measured at a 36-ft elevation, while the international scale requires only a 20-ft elevation. The Beaufort scale is the oldest method of judging wind force. Separate scales for tornadoes and hurricanes did not come until the 1970s. The Fujita scale Fujita scale (fjē`tə, f
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 for tornadoes was proposed in 1971 by Tetsuya (Ted) Fujita. Soon thereafter, the Saffir-Simpson scale Saffir-Simpson scale (săf`ər–)
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 for hurricanes was formulated by Herbert Saffir and Robert Simpson.

Bibliography

See A. Shaw, Beaufort Wind Scale (1995).


Beaufort scale
Meteorol an international scale of wind velocities ranging for practical purposes from 0 (calm) to 12 (hurricane force). In the US an extension of the scale, from 13 to 17 for winds over 64 knots, is used


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Contributing to the value of the text are a chart of the Beaufort Scale, a diagram of the water cycle, a map of the North Pole, and a Venn diagram depicting the intersections of myths, legends, and history.
According to the Beaufort scale, the storm nearly qualified as a hurricane.
 
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