Regarding the sonde from yesterday morning with the 219-kt spot wind, highest dropsonde wind ever seen in a TC, AOML/HRD shared the raw data and I took a look this morning. They’ll have the final call, but I see nothing wrong with the ob and I suspect it’s going to hold up.

Was 234 knot sonde at the 866mb level in Katrina unreliable? tropicalatlantic.com/recon/recon.... Nothing really matches close to it for that storm though, expect one with 182 knots on another mission at the 839mb level. Melissa had another mission with one with 210 knots & other high readings.

That Katrina wind certainly looks strange. I might have the raw sonde data in an archive, or can pull it from HRD’s archive. I’ll look tomorrow.

I’m sure I’ve worked that sonde up before, but after 20 years I just don’t remember.

I couldn't really find much about that Katrina sonde. I found one mention of it here from a presentation in 2006: ams.confex.com/ams/27Hurric... "The Intensity of Wind Gust Underneath Areas of Deep Eyewall Convection in Hurricanes Katrina and Dennis at Landfall" PDF: ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpaper...

From presentation about Katrina sonde: "A dropsonde released into the inner edge of that northeast eyewall descended into a mesovortex that contained a boundary layer (BL) wind peak of 120 meters per second (m/s), or 234 knots, at the 866 mb level (approximately 600 meters above the Gulf surface)."

From presentation about Katrina sonde (continued): "If valid, these would be the highest winds recorded to date in the eight years that GPS sondes have been sampling these BL maxima." Thanks.

Hopefully I can find the raw file. It was obviously of interest at the time and so must be in the archive.

Thanks for that legwork! The sounding has lots of dropouts and there appear to be instability issues associated with the number of GPS satellites, but obviously the data were transmitted in real time. They look suspicious to me on an initial pass but I'm still digging into it.

Found an old email thread from my archives. A number of us looked at it in 2006 and concluded it was likely false. That agrees with my assessment now. The Katrina peak isn't valid.