When that was gone, so were your chances of survival. Stuck here alone with just my book is how countless sailors must have found themselves. We came across a calm so endless that we saw no end in it except death. That's how one sailor remembered it. Classical Music America Nowadays, it's hard to imagine the torture of waiting for the wind sailors endured. But of course, if you survived long enough, the winds would come again. That's because the doldrums follow the seasons. As summertime moves from the northern to the southern hemisphere, the areas of intense heat that create the doldrums moves south, dragging them with it. Then the winds created by that huge global system eventually return. I can feel that breeze now. Let's get outta here! Every wind on Earth begins its cycle here. To see what they can do, I'm off to experience all I can of this invisible force, from the fury of a tornado to the terrifying gales of the Pacific Ocean; from the icy blasts of an Arctic morning and the cooling breeze of a summer day. To get an idea of what to expect, I have to go underground. Wind is measured by the force it exerts on an object. Today, that object is going to be me. Classical Music America This place can produce wind speeds in excess of miles an hour. It's funnelshaped, so the wind speed increases as the air gets squeezed. Up there, where I will stand, the wind is seven times faster than down here. So it's a great place to feel the full force of it. The speed of wind is measured using the Beaufort scale. This is Forceabout six to ten miles an hour. It feels like the gentle breeze of a summer's day. But at to miles per hour, things are picking up. This is Force , a strong breeze where big trees sway and you have to fight your umbrellas. At miles an hour Forceit's getting tough to stand up. A few miles an hour more and there'll be slight damage to your house. Tree branches are already breaking. But once you hit Force , things are getting really stormy. miles an hour, a good gale, trees and power lines down, houses damaged. But I'm still standing, as you can see. It's taking my full weight. In a wind tunnel, it might look like fun, but in nature, winds of this speed are deadly, and we call them hurricanes. The people of Dade County, Florida, know about living through a hurricane. In , Hurricane Radio changed their lives for ever. A devastation, a tragedy like this coming into an area just shakes up people's lives for years and years to come. The nightmare began on Friday August . Like all hurricanes, Radio began life off the coast of Africa in the warm waters of the tropical Atlantic. Hot humid air rose up to create several thunderstorms around an area of low pressure. Because of the earth's rotation, the storms rushed into the low pressure area in an anticlockwise direction, like water down a plughole. This spun them all into one enormous system which was driven across the ocean by powerful winds. , miles away in the United States, the swirling mass of thunderstorms had already been spotted. Classical Music America They'd not yet formed a hurricane, but they were seen as a potential killer and were being closely monitored by hurricane experts.