The Windiest Places on Earth — and the Strongest Winds Ever Recorded
The strongest wind ever reliably measured at the Earth’s surface was 253 mph — and it wasn’t on Mount Washington. It was a gust on Barrow Island, Australia, as Tropical Cyclone Olivia crossed overhead in 1996. Here are the strongest gusts ever recorded and the windiest places on the planet, with a source on every number.
Search “windiest place on Earth” and you get two different questions tangled together, and most lists answer neither cleanly. One is where is it windiest on average — a place. The other is what is the single strongest gust ever measured — a record. They have completely different answers, so we split them, and we sourced every figure to the World Meteorological Organization, NOAA, or the observatory that took the reading.
Start with the record, because it is the one people get wrong most. For 62 years the fastest wind ever clocked belonged to Mount Washington, New Hampshire — 231 mph, April 12, 1934. Then a weather station on a tiny island off northwest Australia caught a 253 mph gust inside the eyewall of a Category 4 cyclone. Here is the full ranking.
The Strongest Surface Winds Ever Recorded
Ranked by peak gust from a surface wind instrument. The top two are WMO-verified or observatory records; the rest are the highest reliable anemometer readings on the books. A famously higher number — a tornado — gets its own asterisk right after.
| # | Gust | Place | Date | Weather system |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 253 mph | Barrow Island, AustraliaWMO world record | Apr 10, 1996 | Tropical Cyclone Olivia |
| 2 | 231 mph | Mount Washington, USA (NH)Held the record 1934–96; still the staffed-station record | Apr 12, 1934 | Extratropical storm |
| 3 | 211.7 mph | Paso Real de San Diego, CubaWMO-verified | Aug 30, 2008 | Hurricane Gustav |
| 4 | 207 mph | Thule Air Base, Greenland | Mar 8, 1972 | Nor’easter |
| 5 | 199.5 mph | Cannon Mountain, USA (NH) | Apr 2, 1973 | Spring storm |
| 6 | 199 mph | Ward Mountain, USA (CA) | Feb 20, 2017 | Atmospheric river |
| 7 | 191 mph | Lanyu, Taiwan | Sep 22, 1995 | Super Typhoon Ryan |
| 8 | 191 mph | Miyako-jima, Japan | Sep 5, 1966 | Super Typhoon Cora |
Barrow Island (253 mph) and Paso Real de San Diego (211.7 mph) are WMO-certified; Mount Washington’s 231 mph is the observatory record. Ranking follows Weather Underground’s compilation of the highest anemometer-measured winds, cross-checked against the WMO archive. A disputed 209 mph reading at Kirkwood, California (2020) is excluded as unverified.
The 302 mph asterisk: tornadoes play a different game
If you have heard that winds “over 300 mph” have been recorded, you are thinking of a tornado — and it is true, with a caveat. On May 3, 1999, a mobile Doppler radar measured roughly 302 mph about 100 meters above the ground inside the Bridge Creek–Moore, Oklahoma EF5 tornado. That is the highest wind speed ever associated with weather on Earth.
So why isn’t it “the wind record”? Because it was estimated remotely, by radar, reading the motion of debris and raindrops aloft inside a tornado — not measured by an anemometer at the surface. No instrument survives a direct hit from an EF5 to log the number. Record-keepers keep the two categories separate: the 253 mph Barrow Island gust is the strongest reading from an actual wind instrument; the 302 mph Moore figure is the strongest radar-estimated tornado wind. Confusing the two is the single most common error on “strongest wind” lists.
The Windiest Places on Earth, by Average
A one-off gust is drama; a high average is a climate. These three places win in three completely different categories — a polar coast, a mountain summit and an ordinary city — which is why a single “windiest place” number is meaningless without saying what kind of place you mean.
Commonwealth Bay is in a league of its own. Douglas Mawson’s 1911–14 expedition, which gave us the phrase “the home of the blizzard,” endured an average wind near 50 mph for months — a sustained speed most places only touch during a hurricane. The wind there is katabatic: air chilled dense over the high Antarctic ice sheet drains downhill under its own weight, funnels through Cape Denison and screams out to sea, often for days without a pause.
Among cities, Wellington, New Zealand — perched on the gale-funneling Cook Strait — is the one most often called the windiest city in the world. In the United States, the windiest city is Dodge City, Kansas, and the question of whether that title belongs to Chicago is a myth we settle with the full numbers in the windiest cities in America.
Why these places get so windy
The record-holders are not random. Extreme wind comes from one of a few recognizable engines, and the windiest places on Earth stack two or three of them on top of each other.
- Tropical cyclone eyewalls. The strongest gusts on the list — Barrow Island, Cuba, the Taiwan and Japan typhoons — all came from the ring of thunderstorms hugging a hurricane’s eye, where the pressure gradient is steepest. Small embedded whirls called mesovortices can briefly double the background wind, which is what produced the 253 mph Barrow Island spike.
- Katabatic drainage. Over Antarctica and Greenland, air cooled against the ice becomes denser than its surroundings and pours downslope under gravity, accelerating as the terrain steepens. This is why a quiet polar coast like Commonwealth Bay is windier, on average, than almost anywhere in the tropics.
- Terrain funneling and exposure. Mount Washington sits where major storm tracks cross and the north–south ridge squeezes the flow up and over a narrow summit — a venturi effect. Wellington’s Cook Strait does the same thing at sea level, compressing wind between two land masses.
- Open fetch. On the flat, treeless High Plains the wind has hundreds of miles to build with nothing to slow it, which is why Dodge City and the rest of the Kansas–Texas Panhandle corridor are the windiest ordinary places in America.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the strongest wind ever recorded?
The strongest wind gust ever reliably measured at the surface was 253 mph (113.2 m/s), recorded on Barrow Island, Australia, on April 10, 1996, during Tropical Cyclone Olivia. The World Meteorological Organization certified it as the world record in 2012. It broke Mount Washington, New Hampshire’s 231 mph gust from April 12, 1934, which had stood as the record for 62 years.
What is the windiest place on Earth?
By sustained average wind, the windiest place on Earth is Commonwealth Bay (Cape Denison) in East Antarctica, which averages about 50 mph (80 km/h) over the year and regularly sees gusts of 150–200 mph. The Guinness Book of World Records and the National Geographic Atlas both name it the windiest place on the planet. Its winds are katabatic — dense, freezing air draining downhill off the Antarctic ice sheet.
Is Mount Washington still the wind record?
No — but it still holds two records. Barrow Island’s 253 mph gust (1996) passed Mount Washington’s 231 mph (April 12, 1934) for the all-time surface record. Mount Washington, New Hampshire, however, remains the highest wind ever recorded by a staffed weather observatory, and the highest surface gust not caused by a tropical cyclone or tornado.
Isn’t the 300 mph wind in a tornado the real record?
That is a different measurement class. A mobile Doppler radar clocked about 302 mph roughly 100 meters above the ground in the Bridge Creek–Moore, Oklahoma EF5 tornado on May 3, 1999 — the highest wind ever measured on Earth. But it was estimated remotely by radar inside a tornado, not measured by a surface anemometer, so it is not the "surface wind record." The 253 mph Barrow Island gust is the strongest reading from an actual wind instrument.
What is the windiest city in the US?
Dodge City, Kansas, at an annual average of 13.1 mph in NOAA’s Comparative Climatic Data — not Chicago, which averages just 9.9 mph. Wellington, New Zealand is widely called the windiest city in the world for its gale-prone exposure in the Cook Strait. Mountaintop stations like Mount Washington (35.7 mph) are far windier but are summits, not cities.
Keep Exploring
Wind is one of our Earth-extremes records. See where the thermometer runs out in the hottest places on Earth and the coldest places on Earth, how deep the snow gets in the snowiest places on Earth, and the rain extremes in the wettest and driest places on Earth. For the US breakdown, there’s the windiest cities in America. Or look up the wind on any day in your town’s past with our weather-history tool — and if your local gauge ever beats one of these, tell us.
Sources & Method
The world-record 253 mph gust (Barrow Island, Cyclone Olivia, April 10, 1996) and the 211.7 mph Hurricane Gustav gust in Cuba are from the WMO World Weather & Climate Extremes Archive. The full gust ranking follows Weather Underground’s compilation of the highest anemometer-measured winds on Earth. Mount Washington’s 231 mph (April 12, 1934) record and 35.7 mph annual average are from the Mount Washington Observatory and NOAA Comparative Climatic Data. Commonwealth Bay / Cape Denison as the windiest place on Earth (~50 mph annual average) is per the record of Douglas Mawson’s 1911–14 expedition, recognized by Guinness World Records and the National Geographic Atlas. The ~302 mph Bridge Creek–Moore tornado figure (May 3, 1999) is a mobile-Doppler-radar estimate, a separate category from surface anemometer readings. Dodge City’s 13.1 mph US-city figure is from NOAA’s Comparative Climatic Data. This page is not derived from our weather database — our archive has no wind field — so every number here is externally cited.