Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 December 15

= December 15 =

Most intense wind
What is the most intense natural wind on Earth? ✶Mitch199811✶ [ Talk ] 04:06, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Possibly tornado. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:14, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * We have a List_of weather records. DMacks (talk) 07:36, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Here is an article about the strongest wind ever recorded. Who knows about unrecorded winds? Cullen328 (talk) 08:23, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * 1999 Bridge Creek–Moore tornado. Cullen328 (talk) 08:27, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you! ✶Mitch199811✶  [ Talk ] 12:51, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Tornados produce very fast air movements, but they are gusts, not sustained winds. A tornado doesn't stay at the same force and exactly the same position for ten minutes. Very high sustained windspeeds are produced by tropical cyclones and have been recorded at up to 185 kn during Hurricane Patricia, which is a one minute average (as Americans tend to calculate such things). Katabatic winds can get very strong too. A piteraq on Greenland in 1970 was recorded at 90 m/s. That would be a ten minute average (as the rest of the world tends to calculate such things). One minute averages tend to be about 14% higher than ten minute averages, so that wind on Greenland was probably stronger than the wind in hurricane Patricia. PiusImpavidus (talk) 20:58, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Almost certainly the jet streams. 2A01:E34:EF5E:4640:4210:3448:E6A9:8778 (talk) 22:21, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The article only says 250 mph while the tornado at least is higher. ✶Mitch199811✶  [ Talk ] 03:31, 16 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Cullen above made an important point. Strong winds destroy recording equipment, so we may never really know the answer to this question. See Cyclone Tracy. (Final paragraph.) HiLo48 (talk) 22:44, 15 December 2022 (UTC)


 * I know I'm always being a weeny for strict definitions, but the original question asked for the "most intense" wind.
 * Does anybody know what the word "intense" means in a meteorological context?
 * The way I learned things, "intensity" is a property of a storm, and not a measure of wind or wind velocity. "Intensity" is a quantitative, numerically predicted product of most modern weather forecast models - notably these "Track and Intensity Models" used by the National Hurricane Center.
 * We can find many definitions for the word "intensity" - including a perfectly precisely-defined meaning in the physical sciences ... or like, fifteen other totally different but equally-perfectly-precisely defined meanings in the physical sciences, but ... I bet our original question meant to ask about "maximum wind velocity." And I bet they were implying "standard" measurement methods for wind speed near Earth's surface (or, say, "1.5 meters above the ground," which is one of the most common standards - like the standard measurement used by NOAA for the Climate Reference Network, which matches most standards used for standard surface observation stations like the ASOS.  And I bet we were all implying that we're all talking only about wind-moving-horizontally-and-totally-ignoring-vertical-velocity.  And, we're probably all implying a standard observation of the sixty-second average with peak gusts.  And ...
 * Look, we have to define terms carefully if we want to meaningfully understand what a record-setting wind even means, let alone when and where it happened!
 * My textbook - Aviation Weather - tells me that tornadoes are the most "violent"; "the most intense of all atmospheric circulations" - and the latest edition (AC 00-06B) goes into detailed discussion about the Enhanced Fujita Scale, detailing why the way they measure wind differs from the way we measure the wind.  "Note: The Enhanced F Scale is a set of wind estimates (not measurements) based on damage. The 3 second gust is not the same wind as in METAR/SPECI surface observations."
 * Lately, microbursts have been a hot topic. "Although microbursts are not as widely recognized as tornadoes, they can cause comparable, and in some cases, worse damage than some tornadoes produce.  In fact, wind speeds as high as 150 mph are possible in extreme microburst cases."
 * To me - for my concerns - I care just as much about the vertical wind speed as the horizontal windspeed in the microburst. The vertical downdraft wind velocity is not measured or reported by most common wind reporting stations!  By the time the vertical column of wind hits the surface, it starts spreading out radially, which means that those "EF-1 tornado" winds they measure are just one little tiny horizontal component of the pi-r-squared flux that's spreading away from the central vertical downdraft.
 * Nimur (talk) 18:17, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, if something is the definition that is used by most non-specialist sources like the weather report on the news, that should always be presumed to be the definition that non-specialists mean when asking such a question. Your points are at once valid and irrelevant to answering the most likely question the OP asks, which unless the specific, should be read to be "what is the strongest winds (as measured and reported by whatever means I am used to hearing such things reported)."  If that's not a complete measurement or give a full picture, or as interesting as these other tangents are to you is mostly irrelevant as that's not really useful in answering the question the OP asked for.  -- Jayron 32 18:43, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Feedback taken! Nimur (talk) 19:12, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The weather report on the news, at least where I live, makes a distinction between wind speed and gust speed (and is usually presented by an actual meteorologist). This wind speed follows the WMO standard for surface wind speed, a 10 minute average at 10 metres above the ground, so I answered with fast, sustained surface winds. From the comments by the OP it appears that gust speed is fine too, whatever is higher.
 * What about the slipstream of a supersonic meteor falling through the stratosphere? It's natural and pretty fast. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:20, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * AFAIK, both average wind speed and gust speed are taken from data from actual physical weather stations that contain an anemometer, which AFAIK, just measure horizontal wind speed at the standard height of the weather station (which is where I believe Nimur above got the 1.5 meter standard for "surface winds"); with gust speed being merely like local maxima and average speed being, well, the average. This describes the specific procedures for averaging the wind speeds.  The measurement itself is not terribly complicated, and it's been largely standardized for decades, probably at least a century at this point, with the exception of the data being transmitted digitally now.  -- Jayron 32 19:34, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I'd drop the subject and walk away, but I keep seeing the discussion fixing back on "surface winds..." which are categorically not where we would find the "most intense natural wind on Earth." The question can't be answered properly if we're couching its answer in a conceptually-invalid framework!  Wind occurs in three dimensions, and we now measure it at many places, including above the surface!
 * Winds at high altitudes are now regular outputs of forecasts and computer models; and these winds are also directly and indirectly observed using airplanes, RADAR, and satellite.
 * I wish I could simply concede that this was "irrelevant" to the original question, except that winds at high altitudes are substantially more intense than surface winds. Even tornados - "the most intense of all atmospheric circulations" - do not always contact the ground!
 * As far as the history goes - some of this is new science! Meteorological science did not have coherent theories, let alone any measurements, pertaining to high altitude winds, before aircraft began regularly flying at high altitudes - the exact place on our planet where the winds are most intense!  The density of the 3D observations and forecasts have improved a lot in recent decades - so much that the textbook I cited above had to be updated in 1954, 1965, 1975, and most recently in 2016.  Gosh, the Enhanced Fujita scale - which quantified "intensity" - the exact word in the original post - was only conceived in this millenium and has only been in use since 2007!  I must respectfully disagree with the assertion that this type of wind speed measurement has been unchanged for decades - especially when we're talking about measurements at the extreme intensity ranges.
 * Even I am old enough to have seen the transition from wind reports that looked like this to pictures like this to animations like this. Low level wind shear RADAR - providing ultra dense local measurements of extreme wind phenomena - evolved from theoretical physics in the 1970s into a standard system in 2013.  Dense wind measurement data and forecasts didn't exist when I was born - not even in computer weather research laboratories at NASA!
 * In a very precise and specific sense, we (scientists and the general public) have learned new things about wind intensity even in the last couple years. The nature of what we have learned has changed scientific understanding of wind in a substantial way.
 * Personally, I think this is a pretty big deal: there are recent, fundamental shifts in the conceptual framework that scientists use for understanding how wind works, how it interplays with climate and earth systems, and how we have to understand it as a 3-D interaction of air flowing everywhere at all parts of the global climate system.
 * These ideas are important - even if we want to reduce it to a factoid like a "wind speed record" for consumption by the general public.
 * Nimur (talk) 14:23, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Big whirls have little whirls, that feed on their velocity... AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:38, 17 December 2022 (UTC)