Beaufort scale

That night, the winds were up to 10 on the Beaufort scale, so it was very choppy.

The reasons for the sinking were unclear: Winds on Saturday were a moderate 5 on the open-ended Beaufort scale.

Even the Beaufort scale, which measures wind speed, categorises it specifically in relation to its impact on objects.

A heavy storm is a nine or a ten on the Beaufort scale, so the alarm sounds at Beaufort force 8.

Two years later, Francis Beaufort, a British naval officer frustrated by the idiosyncratic weather descriptions recorded at sea, proposed twelve standardized gradations of wind strength, from “calm” to “hurricane”: the Beaufort scale.