On April 12, 1934, three weather observers atop a six-thousand-foot New Hampshire mountain measured a wind gust that held the world record for 62 years.
A Pirep featured story · KHIE Mount Washington Regional, Whitefield, NH
Mount Washington in New Hampshire is six thousand two hundred and eighty-eight feet tall — middling height by the standards of the American West. But its position at the convergence of three major storm tracks, its prevailing exposure to westerlies that travel hundreds of miles unobstructed across the continental interior, and the venturi-funnel shape of the Presidential Range mean that on most days the wind at the summit blows twice as hard as in the valley below.
On April 10, 1934, three observers were on shift at the Mount Washington Observatory: senior observer Salvatore "Sal" Pagliuca, Wendell Stephenson, and Alex McKenzie. Two storm systems were converging on New England — one tracking east from the Great Lakes, another spinning up off the Carolinas — and a high-pressure ridge over Atlantic Canada was wedging them both straight at the mountain.
On April 11 the wind began to rise. Pagliuca's shift logs that day note steady triple-digit gusts. The team had been preparing for years for a measurement like the one they thought might be coming: they had designed and hand-built their own heated anemometer, an instrument shielded from ice accumulation that would otherwise lock up the cups and silence the recording.
At 1:21 PM on April 12, the anemometer read 231 miles per hour.
The reading was so improbable that the National Weather Bureau dispatched a team to Mount Washington to recalibrate and re-test the instrument. They confirmed it. The 231-mph gust stood as the highest surface wind speed ever measured by a human being for the next sixty-two years — until April 10, 1996, when Tropical Cyclone Olivia hit Barrow Island off the coast of western Australia and dethroned it at 253 mph. The Mount Washington reading remains the U.S. record.
The observatory still operates today as a nonprofit research station, with weather observers living in week-on, week-off shifts at the summit. Hurricane-force winds (74 mph and above) occur more than one hundred days per year. The wind chill on February 4, 2023 was measured at -108°F — likely the lowest ever recorded in the United States. Pilots flying into KHIE Whitefield, the closest field, can see the summit on clear days fifteen nautical miles east, a sharply pyramidal granite peak that almost always wears a cloud cap. Salvatore Pagliuca lived to age 92 and never stopped giving lectures about the gust.