Bridge Creek–Moore, 1999

The tornado that crossed Bridge Creek and Moore on the evening of 3 May 1999 killed 36 people and was, for a long time, the costliest tornado in US history. A mobile Doppler measured 301 mph inside it, a few hundred feet up — still the highest wind speed ever recorded on this planet.

What the radar shows. The link opens on velocity from Twin Lakes, about thirty miles away. That distance matters: the beam is low enough here to see into the circulation rather than over it, and the couplet — bright green against bright red, gate to gate — is as clean as this signature ever gets on legacy radar.

This was also the pre-dual-pol era. There is no correlation coefficient to confirm debris, no TDS to point at. Everything the warning meteorologists had that night is on this screen, which is a useful thing to sit with while looking at what the same storm would look like today.