Confusingly, the paper[0] cited by this article seems undecided on this front. Figure 1A of the paper puts Hurricane Patricia (2015) into hypothetical category 7, but the "current and proposed categories" in Table 1 stops at declaring category 6 wind speed > 86 m/s (or 192mph, 167 knots, 309 km/h), and category 7 doesn't make an appearance elsewhere in the paper.
I was really hoping to find an authoritative listing of the strongest storms, but it is missing in both the linked article and the underlying paper. The paper itself uses data from International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, which has a confusing website. As a non-expert, the website's top windspeed[1] category lists the following storms with maximum wind speeds of >167 knots (category 6 in the proposed scheme):
There is some research regarding an increase in Saharan dust storms that retards hurricane development in the Eastern Atlantic. Apparently this is still trending upwards and has resulted in fewer hurricanes forming over the last few decades.
Wikipedia gives Typhoon Ida (not to be confused with various hurricanes named Ida) a wind speed of "only" 175 knots (325 kph; 202 mph) which accounts for the largest outlier in the list.
Confusingly, that wikipedia page cites the same IBTrACS system that I referred to, and in that page[0] the max intensity is listed at 213 knots. The data shows that the 213 knot speed was seen for measurements across twelve hours on 1958-09-24.
You are looking at the data for the CMA (China Meteorological Agency). The official data center for the Western Pacific according to the World Meteorological Agency is the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA/Tokyo), but the IBTrACS dataset does not have wind speeds from them for 1958.
The Wikipedia article is sourcing data from the JTWC (Joint Typhoon Warning Center), the US wind column for 1-minute sustained wind speeds. In general, the Wikipedia convention is to include wind speed data from the JMA and JTWC when available.
I was really hoping to find an authoritative listing of the strongest storms, but it is missing in both the linked article and the underlying paper. The paper itself uses data from International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, which has a confusing website. As a non-expert, the website's top windspeed[1] category lists the following storms with maximum wind speeds of >167 knots (category 6 in the proposed scheme):
I don't see any explanation for why there were so many fantastically powerful storms in the 1950s-60s. Perhaps the older data is of dubious quality?[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121#t01
[1] https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=browse-wind#210