Nevertheless, the Beaufort scale concept is still valid. Long live the good Admiral or, at least, his scale. The frame below is a summary of modern day reporting practice on ships that provide weather observations. For weather forecasting purposes, meteorologists use wind data averaged over 10-minutes and professional observers are trained to take such averages. This is built in to the automatic systems increasingly coming into use.
Waves result from the average wind at the time.
The wind deduced from the sea state is the nearest practical equivalent to the 10-minute representative measurement made at land stations. Since 1855, ships officers have reported the weather on behalf of Meteorological Services. Nowadays, some 7000 merchant ships transmit their reports in real time to provide valuable and otherwise unobtainable data for use by weather forecasters. Most of the wind reports from these ships are still made by visual observations of the sea state and, no doubt, partly on the behaviour of the vessel. Even a large tanker will have a motion that depends upon the wind, or more correctly, the sea generated by that wind.