The Strongest Hurricanes Ever Recorded

http://www.wunderground.com/news/strongest-hurricanes-ever-recorded

The Strongest Hurricanes Ever Recorded
Published: October 24, 2015

With 200-mph winds and higher gusts, Hurricane Patricia became strongest Western hemisphere hurricane ever recorded by the U.S. National Hurricane Center and the third-strongest in world history, as measured by 1-minute averaged wind speed, according to Weather Underground's director of metrology Dr. Jeff Masters. Based on its strengthening pattern Thursday overnight into Friday, Oct. 23, it is also the fastest-intensifying hurricane recorded.
(FORECAST: Hurricane Patricia | Patricia in Photos)
The 8 a.m. NHC advisory warned of a "potentially catastrophic landfall in southwestern Mexico" later Friday, adding "Patricia is expected to remain an extremely dangerous Category 5 hurricane through landfall." An extremely dangerous storm surge is forecast to accompany the landfall.
Officially, here are the strongest tropical cyclones in world history, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and the National Hurricane Center (using 1-minute averaged sustained winds), compiled by Dr. Masters for his blog.

Super Typhoon Nancy (1961)

Track map of Typhoon Nancy of the 1961 Pacific typhoon season. (Wikimedia Commons)

Super Typhoon Nancy (1961), 215 mph winds, 882 mb. This storm made landfall as a Category 2 in Japan, where it killed 191 people. "However, it is now recognized (Black 1992) that the maximum sustained winds estimated for typhoons during the 1940s to 1960s were too strong," Dr. Masters warns on his blog of the historical data. "The strongest reliably measured tropical cyclones were both 10 mph weaker than Patricia, with 190 mph winds—the Western Pacific's Super Typhoon Tip of 1979, and the Atlantic's Hurricane Allen of 1980. Both storms had a hurricane hunter aircraft inside of them to measure their top winds."
Dr. Masters noted that Dr. Hugh Willoughby, former head of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, said of data of this time period, "I would not take the winds seriously because reconnaissance meteorologists estimated them visually."