Super Typhoon Haiyan's 170 kt Peak Intensity: has Super Typhoon Tip been Dethroned?

Super Typhoon (STY) Haiyan (renamed, "Yolanda" in the Philippines) reached a record-breaking 170 kt prior to landfall in the central portion of the Philippine archipelago. When the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) upped Haiyan's intensity to 170 kt on its advisory at 1800 UTC 07 November 2013, this tropical cyclone surpassed the previous world record of 165 kt assigned to Super Typhoon Tip on the morning of October 12, 1979. STY Haiyan's passage through the central Philippines was devastating and deadly. Stories and views of the destruction in the city of Tacloban, the regional center of the Eastern Visayas, dominated international news sources for days. As intense and deadly as this TC was, there was immediate controversy regarding its purported record high intensity and other lesser included records such as the most intense TC to ever make landfall, the most intense TC to ever strike the Philippines, etc. Facts: (1) Haiyan was given by many the highest value of T 8.0 on Dvorak's satellite TC intensity estimation techniques; (2) using the satellite estimates, the JTWC upped Haiyan to 170 kt, which is the highest intensity ever assigned to a TC by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center; (3) STY Tip was reconnoitered by an aircraft, STY Haiyan was not; (4) the peak intensity of 165 kt for Tip was not measured by aircraft, but derived from the aircraft report of 870 mb for its minimum sea-level pressure (MSLP); (5) Haiyan's MSLP of 895 mb was estimated by the JTWC using a recently derived wind-pressure relationship; and (6) in the years since STY Tip, there have been several other TCs to reach the T 8.0 threshold, but they were not assigned 170 kt. This talk will explore the reasons for, and the validity of, the assignment of T 8.0 to STY Haiyan and its accompanying peak intensity of 170 kt (the new modern era world record!).