by In 1934, a “High wind” whipped past the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire at 231 mph (372 km/h). In 1985, a microburst crashed a Delta Airlines flight onto the tarmac. And in 2017, Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc, ripping off roofs and uprooting trees. winds over 185 mph (298km/h). So what is the fastest wind speed ever recorded?
There are different records depending on where the wind occurred, what created it, and what instrument measured it.
The strongest winds in the solar system occur on Neptune, where they blow at a supersonic speed of 1,100 mph (1,770 km/h), or 1.5 times the speed of sound, according to NASA.
On Earth, man-made wind tunnels can create supersonic winds, defined as faster than 761.2 mph (1,225 km/h) at sea level. Like the 10×10 supersonic wind tunnel NASA Glenn Research Centerwhich can create wind speeds of up to mach 3.5, or about 2,685 mph (4,321 km/h).
The maximum natural wind gust ever recorded is 253 mph (407 km/h), according to the Archives of extreme global weather and climate conditionswhich is managed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It happened on Barrow Island, Australia, on April 10, 1996, when a tropical cyclone hit the isolated island. (Tropical cyclones are the same as hurricanesbut occur in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.) An anemometer – an instrument that usually has three cups that rotate around a central axis when the wind blows – at the island’s weather station recorded the gust of 3 to 5 seconds.
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It took more than a decade before WMO became aware of the data and confirmed it in records, because Barrow Island is owned by the oil company Chevron.
“It kind of fell through the cracks for a few years” Randall Cervenyprofessor of geographic sciences at Arizona State University, told Live Science. Cerveny is also the WMO rapporteur on weather and climate extremes, and his team was responsible for verifying the record. They traveled to Australia and found the same anemometer intact and functional. The reading was not an anomaly.
The WMO only recognizes wind speed data from instruments such as anemometers because it is a physical measurement of wind, Cerveny said. This means recorded wind speeds are faster than those at Barrow Island, but they were measured with devices that use estimations or calculations, so they are not in the record books.
However, the anemometer readings have some limitations. The structures they are mounted on can be damaged by high winds and they can only be placed where humans can go. For example, it is not easy to place an anemometer at a height of 6 to 13 kilometers in the jet stream. Jet streams are fast-moving rivers of air that can reach speeds above 275 mph (443 km/h), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Cerveny and his team are currently studying jet stream speed records of 300 mph (483 km/h) over Japan and the western Pacific Ocean as potential records. These would be direct measurements of the wind taken by an instrument called radiosonde attached to a weather balloon. “These may be the strongest winds we have ever seen on the planet,” he said.
Another way to measure wind speed is to use Doppler. radar. Radar records are not considered by the WMO for wind records because they are remote estimates, as opposed to direct measurements, Cerveny said. The radar sends a pulse of energy that scatters raindrops or water droplets from clouds and measures the energy that returns. It repeats this process and calculates the difference between the readings.
“We can then calculate the speed at which the average raindrop moves in this volume,” Joshua Wurmandirector of the Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets (FARM) facility at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told Live Science.
The biggest advantage of radar is that it can measure distant objects, Wurman said. These include fast-moving tornadoes, which can whip through the air at speeds even faster than at Barrow Island.
Wurman studies tornadoes using “Doppler on wheels“, a radar installed on the back of a large truck. This allows him to track tornadoes and map them with radar without having to be inside the tornado. These speeds will not appear in the book records (for now) because the WMO considers Tornado wind speeds to be a separate category, because they cannot be measured directly But, if they obtain wind measurements by verifiable physical instruments. Inside a tornado, they will likely restructure the extreme wind categories to reflect the new data, Cerveny told Live Science in an email.
Wurman and others recorded the highest tornado wind speeds in 1999 in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma, at 302 mph (486 km/h), according to WMO records. Wurman published the results in a 2007 article in the journal Monthly weather review.
More recently, Wurman’s team calculated wind speeds of up to 309 to 318 mph (497 to 512 km/h) during a tornado that ripped through Greenfield, Iowa, in May 2024, according to a release from the FARM facility. However, the margin of error in the radar estimate means this new reading is basically the same as the 1999 reading, Wurman said.
“I think it’s safe to say that there are rare tornadoes with wind speeds in excess of 300 mph. [483 km/h]” he said. “There probably aren’t any that exceed 400 mph [644 km/h]simply because we haven’t seen anything far in excess of 300.”
