With a gust in Hurricane Melissa setting a record for peak gust measured by a specialized instrument dropped into the eye of a hurricane – 252 mph – you might be wondering what are the fastest speeds ever recorded.
The question, like many, can take you down a rabbit hole, with a lot of nuance based on who's measuring and what's being measured, but we turned to a few sources of authority for a look at some of the top speeds in nature, and in cars.
The World Meteorological Organization keeps an official record of weather and climate extremes.
The strongest recorded surface wind is 253 mph, according to the Rapporteur of Weather and Climate Extremes for the WMO project, Randall Cerveny, a professor of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University.
That wind was measured at Barrow Island, Australia by an automated weather station during Tropical Cyclone Olivia on April 10, 1996. The WMO uses only speeds recorded by instruments, not estimates or calculations, but at this time does not maintain records for dropsonde measurements.
