Possible 200mph wind gust in New Mexico...

[JimS]

Just had this forwarded to me from a friend who works at Weather Underground...seems the storm out west pumped out a 200mph gust before instrument failure. Interested to see more details...

Data...
http://www.wunderground.com/weathers...=2009&month=12

Site Information...
http://www.mro.nmt.edu/Home/index.htm

[Bill O]

Um, 222mph? That's impressive.

Seems odd though. They were well below freezing and recording precip at the time (I assume some kind of heated can), which also leads me to believe they were experiencing some sort of riming. I have no idea how a Vaisala can hold up in those winds with riming. But...the data looks realistic. It will be interesting how this plays out.

[Bill O]

Not looking good. I heard they were using an ultrasonic that doesn't behave well above 130mph, let alone in icing conditions.

[Turd Ferguson]

This is the model of weather station they are using.

I looked at the specs for that particular station and the range for the ultrasonic was 0-60 m/s which, if I can still convert correctly on paper , gives a range of 0-134 mph.

There is also a visable disconnect in the data right after this gust...a gust which has its wind direction listed as calm, so 00000G222KT. There is obviously some malfunction going on. A note on their weather page says something along the lines of: data forced to zero during transmission problems...which would explain the loss of data or zero values for the time period after this gust

I think Bill got it right with the rime scenario. The station sits at 10,600 feet so they are more than likely in the clouds during a storm. It's also known that sonic anemometors show huge values during heavy precip and icing.