What Are the Highest Tornado Wind Speeds?

Tornadoes are some of the most awe-inspiring and fearsome storms on earth. They can level entire cities, and though they lack the size of a hurricane they make up for it with sheer ferocity. And unlike hurricanes, tornadoes strike with little to no warning, giving people precious little or no time to get to safety. What makes these storms so frightening is the speeds which they generate, giving them the ability to hurl debris great distances.

Features

A tornado is essentially a rotating column of air that forms between the ground and the base of a cloud, usually the kind of clouds associated with thunderstorms. The visible part of the tornado is known as the funnel, and this is the part that churns up the ground and hurls debris. They come in a range of speeds and sizes, and there is a system used to measure them.

The Fujita Scale

This system is known as the Fujita Scale. (There are other scales used, but this is the most common and the one local meteorologists will use when talking about tornadoes on the news and weather.) It ranges from an F-Scale Number F0 to an F5, and is determined in the wake of a tornado by both wind speed and damage caused. For an F0 wind speeds can be as little as 40 miles per hour (mph) and only cause light damage.

F5

The fastest tornadoes are F5s. These have wind speeds anywhere between 261 to 318 mph and are extremely devastating. This is fast enough to hurl cars over a hundred yards, strip the bark from trees (and uproot small trees), tear up houses, and even damage steel-reinforced concrete buildings. These are the tornadoes that destroy entire towns. Although they can be wide, some have occurred with narrow paths of destruction.

How Big is Big?

One of the more recent F5 tornadoes occurred in Oklahoma in early May 1999. Winds at ground level were measured at an estimated 300 mph, the highest such winds recorded in a tornado since records have been kept (starting in the 1950s). During the Andover, Kansas outbreak that spawned 55 tornadoes, an F4 (because it caused little damage by touching down in a rural area) was measured at nearly 270 mph.

Smaller But Deadly

However, despite their severity, F5 and even F4 tornadoes are rather rare. Most tornadoes are smaller, shorter-lived and often touch down only briefly in the middle of fields or other areas free from man-made structures. The average tornado has a wind speed of around 110 mph or less (an F1), is about 250 feet across and travels a mile or so before it breaks up. Of course, even a very weak tornado can still kill, and any tornado is a dangerous one.