Fastest Winds Recorded

Date: May 3, 1999 • Location: Tuttle, United States

A Doppler on Wheels team measured the fastest winds recorded on Earth, at 143.6 m/s (321 mph; 517 km/h), in a tornado near Bridge Creek, Oklahoma.

Doppler on Wheels (DOW) is a fleet of quickly deployable truck-mounted weather radars managed by FARM, an American research company affiliated with the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The group, which started under the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology before becoming an independent nonprofit research facility in 2003, is led by atmospheric scientists Joshua Wurman and Karen Kosiba. FARM is partially funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the "Community Instruments and Facilities" program. The DOW fleet has been used throughout the United States since 1995 and internationally since 1999 to research hazardous and challenging weather phenomena such as tornadoes, hail, and hurricanes. The name refers to the doppler weather radars mounted on the trucks, which are able to determine precipitation intensity, velocity, and direction by analyzing the frequency shifts of radar returns.