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Remembering Big Wind
Fri Apr 11, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. One of the greatest moments in weather history
took place on April 12th of 1934, in a cabin with an oil cook stove and a frost-covered
kitchen window. But this was no ordinary place for a cabin. This was Mount Washington, New
Hampshire. Outside, under a sheet of snow and frozen rain a foot thick, the wind gusted to 160
miles per hour. Windows pressed into the room, ready to implode. The whole structure seemed to
breathe in and out.
A sudden roar of the wind caused the three weather observers, Alex McKenzie, Wendell
Stephenson, and Salvatore Pagliuca, to take a closer listen to the rapid clicking of the
anemometer, an instrument used to measure windspeed. The anemometer, bolted to the roof and
connected to a meter inside, looked like a large metal hockey puck with fins.
The disk spun in the wind. Faster and faster came the clicks. Meteorologist Pagliuca used a
stopwatch to measure the time between the clicks while observers at Blue Hill Observatory,
just outside Boston, listened via radio. Pagliuca's measurements showed the wind on the roof
to be 200 to 225 miles per hour.
A sudden gust at 1:21 p.m. calculated out to... 231 miles per hour. Wrote Pagliuca in the
log: "I knew it was a record, but will they believe it?"
Today, Mount Washington still holds the distinction for being the site of the highest wind
ever observed on Earth, and weather observers are still there to take hourly observations,
waiting to break the record again.
Thanks today goes to all weather observers past and present. The Weather Notebook is a
production of The Mount Washington Observatory and is supported generously by Subaru of
America and the National Science Foundation.
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