The app
GALE
The Beaufort scale, by eye.
Sailors, walkers and gardeners have always been able to name a wind just by looking: the way smoke leans, leaves shiver, whole trees heave, or the sea turns from glass to spray. Gale teaches that skill with the Beaufort scale, the thirteen-step system that turns "it's a bit blowy" into something you can judge. Every force from 0 to 12 comes alive on screen, a land scene beside a sea scene, both drawn and animated in the app.
- Estimate
- Sky signs
- Quizzes
Each force
Calm, fresh breeze, storm
Open any force for the full picture: its proper name, its speed range in knots, km/h or mph as you prefer, and plain-language descriptions of the tell-tale signs on land and at sea, down to rough wave heights. A side-by-side comparison teaches the land and sea vocabularies together, so the same gust makes sense on a hillside or a harbour wall.
The estimator is where the skill builds. Drag from dead calm to full hurricane and watch the scenes answer in real time, or switch to "read the signs": tick off what you can actually see — smoke drifting, leaves rustling, umbrellas turning inside out — and the app suggests the likely force. Quizzes then test you: name the force from a scene, match signs to numbers, recall how fast a fresh breeze really blows.
Switch between Bulgarian and English, pick your units and animation intensity. Offline, no sensors, no forecast, no ads.
Get Gale on Google PlayPackage com.windloft.gale
An eye, not an instrument. Gale reads no sensors and forecasts nothing: it can't tell you what the wind is doing outside or what it will do in an hour. Don't sail, fly, climb, cycle a coast road or take a boat out on the strength of an estimate. In Bulgaria the official forecasts and warnings come from the National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology; at sea, use the marine forecast for your area. Storm-force wind hurts people who go out to look at it. Emergencies anywhere in the EU: 112.
Working out
A force 12 isn't twice a force 6
Beaufort's scale has an exact modern definition: the wind speed at force B is 0.836 · B1.5 metres per second. Push on anything and the pressure goes as the square of the speed, so the push goes as B3. Drag the scale and the whole page speeds up with it — the streaks behind this text, and the flag.
What the wind is pushing
What's not here: no scenes, no land and sea signs, no force descriptions and no quiz. This page draws one abstract flag and does arithmetic; it never shows you what a force looks like, which is the whole of the app. The pressure figure assumes sea-level air at 1.225 kg/m³, a steady wind rather than a gust, and a flat object square to the flow, so treat the kilograms as an order of magnitude.
On paper
BlueCove Digital
- Company
- LONANA LTD EOOD, trading as BlueCove Digital
- Manager
- Ivanka Velinova
- Address
- Ovcha Kupel distr., Block 6P, Entr. Zh, Floor 7, Ap. 21, Sofia 1618, Bulgaria
- knots@lonana.skin
Можете да ни пишете и на български.