Was World Wind Speed Record Challenged in 1996?
UPDATE: This new record of 254 mph has now been accepted by the WMO! We have a new World Wind Speed Record! (I had errantly said 253 mph below, which was converted from 113 m/s = 407 km/h).
I was recently turned on to some information regarding a storm that struck Australia in 1996 - Category 4 Tropical Cyclone Olivia (hurricanes are called Cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere). It seems that this storm produced wind gusts of 113 m/s or 253 mph (or so the instrument claimed), which would be considerably above the world record surface wind gust of 231 mph measured at Mount Washington, NH in 1934. I have obtained permission from Chevron Corporation to display this wind graph, taken during the storm at Barrow Island:
Why it took 3 years for a paper to be done on it, why it has surfaced again 13 years later through a series of emails, and why this is totally undocumented on the Internet, is a bit of a mystery.
This 113 meters per second number came from a report from Peter Black et.al. in 1999. I downloaded the PDF from here (press the first button on the page to retrieve the document), though the link is no longer working. I am not allowed to redistribute it here. You can download it yourself for $10 from OnePetro, where you can also read an abstract which says, in part:
However, there are a couple of issues with verifying the recording. For one, the highest estimates of surface wind speed in the strongest tropical cyclone on Earth were 95 m/s (213 mph) and have since been discredited. This makes it seem unlikely that 253 mph was possible in any sort of hurricane. And like with the Gustav Gust (see below) I thought that the gust was suspiciously higher than the sustained wind, something Black admitted in the PDF: "The extreme gusts represented extreme gust factors of 2.27-2.75, nearly twice the average gust factor throughout the storm of 1.33. This clearly suggests that some process other than mechanical turbulence is important during this period."
Mr. Black's paper proposes that the incredible wind speeds were caused by a mesoscale vortex embedded within the eye wall - a sort of tornado within a hurricane, if you will. He concludes:
That said, he's not speaking officially for NOAA I don't believe, and when I called NOAA's information line to get his phone number, they said that he had never been employed for them (the plot thickens?). However, I found his NOAA email through Google and asked for more information on the gust -- for example, has there ever been any official verification of it? He did not reply as of this writing.
I was also forwarded emails from a Certified Consulting Meteorologist at Aerospace & Marine International Corp who said that the gust was being verified (this year) by an agency in France. He also confirmed that the gust was measured by a "Synchrotec cup anemometer."(also no hits on Google). Even more interesting, he said that the instrument had survived the gust and they put it in a wind tunnel, only to have the cups blow off during the test. He blamed that on the technician not screwing in the screws good enough, but some people believe that a cup anemometer is not capable of measuring extreme wind speeds because they simply blow apart.
The short answer is, it depends on what type of cup anemometer we're talking about. For a standard issue one like shown at left above, any claim that it would survive a hurricane is, well, a crock.* But remember the World Record Wind at Mount Washington was measured using a bizarre-looking anemometer (above, right) that was technically a "cup anemometer." Mount Washington uses a Pitot Tube Anemometer these days, which really has no moving parts, so it has no problem with extreme speeds (see Brian Clark's blog here and here).
Wikipedia doesn't have much on Olivia but the Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has a page with some excellent charts, photos and a scary satellite image. Neither mentions this famous gust.
Also interesting... According to an Australian Science Alert site: "As Category 4 Tropical Cyclone Olivia tracked across Australia’s North West Shelf in April 1996, a wave-measuring buoy recorded a 22-metre (72-foot) monster passing Woodside Energy’s North Rankin A gas platform."
Hurricane Ivan produced the highest ever wave ever measured in a hurricane at 91 feet (27.7 meters), though it is rumored to have featured waves as high as 132 feet (40 meters).
Interestingly, Woodside Energy was mentioned as being the owner of the station who measured the gust, proving that the more oil platforms with weather stations we have out there, the better.
You can see a map of Barrow Island on Google Maps below. Apparently, it is Australia's top producing oil site [WikiPedia].
The weather station there does not have data online, nor is even supposed to have existed in 1996, whether you look it up on the Beureau Of Meteorology site, NODC / CSRIO, NCDC's site (WMO / Synoptic ID 95304), so I have to assume that there was more than one weather station there and the ones that I just listed are not the one that is privately owned by Chevron or Woodside Energy that recorded the graph above.
[NOTE: THIS LIST HAS BEEN SUPERSEDED BY A NEWER ONE]
In addition to talking about the all-time world wind record, we can also reminisce about recent gusts which challenged the all-time wind-gust-during-a-hurricane/typhoon/cyclone-on-land record (previously 186 mph in Massachusetts during the The Great New England Hurricane of 1938.
Typhoon Paka - 236 MPH - "Disputed"
When Typhoon Paka hit Guam in 1998 (something I wrote about on the WeatherMatrix site at the time), a wind instrument there recorded a 236-mph gust. This was debunked here when NOAA said "In regards to the recorded wind gust of 205 knots (i.e., 236 miles per hour) during Typhoon Paka at Andersen AFB on 16 December 1997, based on the entire wind record at the site, Guam WSR-88D data, a site survey, and ground and aerial damage assessments, we consider the peak gust to be unreliable." Of course, Mount Washington was thrilled to hear this, because this would have also meant they had lost their claim to the all-time wind record, and Brian Clark's blog has some additional information about the "hot-wire" anemometer that was used there. Like me during Gustav, Brian pointed out that the sustained-vs-gust difference seemed way too high, but if we are to buy Peter's "meso vortex" explanation, that would be explained.
Hurricane Gustav - 211 MPH - "Status Unknown"
During Hurricane Gustav in August 2008, a 211 mph claim was issued by the Meteorological Service of Cuba at Pinar del Rio. I thought it was suspect due to the amount that the gust was higher than the sustained wind speed, but other meteorologists bought it. NOAA has acknowledged the potential record [PDF], but has never followed up (that I can find). Rumor was that the WMO was to validate the reading before Spring 2009, but I can't find any evidence that ever happened either. I dropped them an email as well but haven't heard anything back yet. (UPDATE 4/3: I received the following reply: "Contact the National Meteorological Service of Cuba ("Instituto de Meteorología") for more details." Sigh.)
Antarctica Gust - 211 MPH - "Status Unknown"
UPDATE: Antarctica claimed a 211 MPH gust in late April 2009, after this article was written. AccuWeather.com's Brian Clark has the details in his blog entry:
Miyakojima 190 MPH - "Status Unknown"
Chris Burt, Author of "Extreme Weather" contributed to this blog entry, and said in his book that there was a 190 mph wind gust measured on the island of Miyakojima in the Ryukyu Island chain on Sept. 5, 1966.
And outside of hurricanes, we have these:
Doppler Radar 318 MPH - "Not Official"
And finally, if we look at Doppler Radar measured wind gusts in tornadoes, the ante is upped over 300 mph. As I noted back in 2005 when talking about this subject, a remote Doppler radar also measured a wind of 318 mph in the Oklahoma City tornado in 1999, but the observation was "hundreds of feet" high, rather than on the ground as the other records mentioned. Prior to that, a "near-surface" wind reading of 286 mph was recorded by Doppler radar in a tornado in 1991, but that record is not considered official because it was not measured by an instrument and may have not been on ground level.
Grandfather Mountain 200 MPH* - "Disputed"
A 200 mph* reading surfaced at Grandfather Mountain, NC in 2006 (might have been higher but the anemometer couldn't go above 200), but was later disputed due to the physical location of the anemometer (they have since upgraded to a new location and instrument).
Greenland 207 MPH - "Verified"
Chris Burt [JessePedia], Author of "Extreme Weather" contributed to this blog entry, and said in his book that a 207 mph reading happened at Thule, Greenland in 1972. This PDF about the Cannon Mountain gust infers that the Greenland reading reading was verified.
Cannon Mountain 200 MPH* - "Verified"
Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire gusted to 200 mph* April 12, 1973. This PDF says that the reading was verified.
Longs Peak, CO 201 MPH - "Status Unknown"
This website says that Longs Peak, CO gusted to 201 mph in 1981 but does not give any information on whether the reading was ever authenticated.
Additional strong wind gusts that I have blogged about before include:
- 183 mph at Lee Vining, California - December 2006
Regardless of what any of us think, the measurement during Olivia needs to be verified by a meteorological institution, probably the WMO, before we can close the case on this. If there are any updates to any of this info in the future, I'll post them at the top of this article. So, to summarize:
WORLD WIND RECORDS:
- Oklahoma City 1999 - Tornado, Above Ground, By Doppler Radar (NOT OFFICIAL)
- Australia 1996 - Cyclone Olivia, On Ground, By Cup Anemometer (UNVERIFIED)
- Guam 1997 - Typhoon Paka, By Hot-Wire Anemometer (DISPUTED)
- Winter Storm 1934 at Mount Washington, By Cup Anemometer (OFFICIAL WORLD RECORD)
- Winter Storm 1972 in Greenland (VERIFIED)
- Winter Storm 1981 in Colorado (NOT VERIFIED)
- Winter Storm in North Carolina (DISPUTED)
- Winter Storm 1973 in New Hampshire, By Cup Anemometer (VERIFIED)
- Tropical Storm 1966 in Miyakojima (NOT VERIFIED)
- Massachusetts 1938 - Hurricane, On Ground (OFFICIAL WORLD LAND HURRICANE RECORD)
*Rounded up from 199.5 mph
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