Derecho

It seems like rain is getting far too much attention today. It rained a lot last year apparently, the second most since records began, but they don't seem to measure wind records unless they are individual high speedy ones that blow things all over the place. The only big-wind memory I have is of 'The Great Storm' of 1987. I was seven at the time and got to go home early from school in case my scrawny bones took to the skies. I remember being quite excited by the prospect of windiness, thinking it an opportunity for flight - I attempted spreading my arms and taking off on the way home, but all the only real effect that the wind had on my frame was that it made it slightly more troublesome to walk to the bus-stop. The wind couldn't have been particularly high at this point, otherwise double-decker buses would surely not have been careering down Portland Road carrying ruined haircuts homewards.
  The most ferocious point of the storm took place in the night and I slept through the whole thing and was surprised to find that a tree had fallen onto our shed when I awoke in the morning. Now that I've finished with my wind-autobiography (that type of wind anyway), I shall move onto the point of this post, and explore the language of wind and where the boundary between a light breeze and a gentle breeze occurs. I remember learning about the twelve-stage Beaufort Scale in Primary School. Here's some brief details: a light breeze starts at 4 miles per hour at Beaufort number two and this is when wind can be felt on exposed skin. Breezes then travel through stages gentle (Beaufort 3), moderate (4) - the average human breathes out at 15 mph which in this category - , fresh (5) and peaks at strong (6). A strong breeze is between 25 and 30 mph which seems pretty quick to still be in the breeze category. If you're traveling in the direction of the wind at the same speed as the wind, would that mean that you wouldn't be able to feel the wind? I'm afraid I have no answer to that question that has just popped into my head.
  Beaufort number 7 moves us into near-gale category at 31 mph. This is when it becomes hard work to walk into the wind - I reckon this must have been where we were at when I exited my school in 1987, although I was only a young child, so perhaps it wasn't that fast yet. As I tappetty-tap, another wind memory has crawled into my mind. I was on a school trip somewhere and my memory suggests that we were really close to the edge of a cliff although that seems unlikely. On this occasion, my classmates and I were testing the wind's ability to hold us up if we leant backwards into it. With the assistance of a Tesco carrier-bag providing a little more drag, I seem to remember one boy achieving very close to an equilibrium between his weight and the wind's power.
  39 mph is where a near-gale becomes an actual gale (8) and then at 47 mph a strong gale (9). 1987, the time in my life where wind was at its highest was at point 10 - storm, somewhere between 55-63 mph. At 64 mph (11), the storm becomes a violent storm and at 74 mph (12), we have the hurricane. Did you know, the fastest speed that snot is recorded to have travelled out of someone's nose is 102 mph, so if you got lots of people in a line and they all sneezed at once in the same direction, then you would have a pretty ferocious snot hurricane in the few millimetres in front of their noses.
  The Beaufort Scale is all about wind-speed, but there are also words to describe the way the wind blows. For example, a tornado is a vortex of rapidly rotating winds created by a thunderstorm and extends all the way from the clouds to the ground, whereas a whirlwind is just a column of air moving about, but not necessarily connected to the ground or clouds; a typhoon is specific to a tropical area.
  Finally, I come to the word that entitles this blog entry: derecho. This refers to a wind that travels in a straight line and they often come with a fast-moving band of extreme thunderstorms. This year's high winds in Argentina and in the east of America were examples of derechos. So there you go: I feel fairly educated about wind now and I hope you do also. Derecho is also a potentially helpful word in Scrabble.