Every wind record in NOAA's Hawaii database, ranked

This ranking covers the highest wind speeds and strongest wind gusts recorded across Hawaii, every entry drawn from the NOAA Storm Events Database. Speeds are stored in knots on the original record and converted here to miles per hour. Where two records share a speed the earlier one is listed first. The rank column renumbers when you pick an island.

Tap islands on the map, or use the buttons underneath, to add them to the ranking; tap a selected island again to drop it, and All Hawaii clears the pick. The buttons work everywhere, including on a phone, where several of these islands are too small to aim at reliably. The Sort menu orders the list by strength or by date; when it is sorted by date, the number on each row is still that record's strength rank.

Measured, or estimated from the damage

Of the 602 records here, 213 were measured by an instrument. The other 389 are the weather service's own estimate, usually worked backwards from what the wind did to trees, power lines and roofs. An estimate is a professional judgment, not a reading, and the difference matters if you are citing one of these numbers.

17 records carry a magnitude code of "M", which is not in NOAA's published list of codes. Rather than guess what it meant, this page counts them as not stated.

The summit readings hiding in island-wide zones

Before 2005 the weather service often filed an event against a whole island rather than a named zone, so a reading taken on Mauna Kea comes through as "Island of Hawaii" with nothing in the zone name to say it was a summit. 90 such records are marked here as summit readings anyway: 11 because the write-up on the record itself says where the instrument was, and 79 more because the storm write-up shared across an episode's records attributes the exact figure to a summit, most often Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa. If a ranking of Hawaii wind does not separate those out, its top ten is mostly observatory data presented as if it were island weather.

Island by island

Record counts are a measure of what the weather service wrote up, not of how windy an island is. Hawaii Island leads this table partly because it has the instruments.

Where these records come from, and what is missing

The source is NOAA's bulk Storm Events data files, filtered to Hawaii and to the three event types that carry a wind speed: High Wind, Strong Wind and Thunderstorm Wind. Records without a speed are not in this ranking, which is why the count here is smaller than the number of wind events in the Oahu index.

The database starts in 1996 for wind. Nationwide, only hail, thunderstorm wind and tornadoes were keyed before 1996, so Hurricane Iniki in 1992 and Hurricane Iwa in 1982 are not in this file. Their absence is a gap in the database, not in the weather. Iniki's peak reported gust, 217 mph at Makaha Ridge on Kauai, appears in the weather service's own survey report of the storm, which notes the instrument was uncalibrated, so its accuracy could not be determined. Even unverified, it would sit at the top of this list.

NOAA reuses zone numbers between eras, so any filter built on zone numbers rather than zone names mixes islands together. This page keys on names. NOAA also misspells Waianae Mountains as "Wainae Mountains" in its own data, and that misspelling is left as filed on the row.

Duplicates were removed where the same event was filed twice under different record numbers with identical dates, zones, speeds and write-ups.

The last two or three months are normally not in yet. NOAA publishes roughly 75 to 90 days after the end of each month.