The hottest place on Earth may have just got a little hotter
A reading of 54.4°C in Death Valley is one of the hottest ever recorded -- but whether it's THE hottest is hard to tell.
The parched desert of Death Valley, California, is often billed as the hottest place on Earth, and if a temperature reading from the weekend holds up, it might be able to consider that crown secure -- though with an asterisk.
The U.S. National Weather Service says an automated weather station at Furnace Creek near the visitor centre showed a reading of 54.4°C Sunday afternoon, the hottest ever measured in the month of August for that location.
"If verified, this will be the hottest temperature officially verified since July of 1913, also at Death Valley," the NWS said.
On July 10th that year, a temperature of 56.7°C was recorded at Furnace Creek, a little more than two degrees higher than the latest blistering milestone.
Furnace Creek in Death Valley has a good, if disputed, claim to being the hottest place on Earth. Photo: Roland Arhelger/Wikimedia Commons
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However, Sunday's temperature may actually outshine that century-old extreme, depending on how you look at it.
The often-cited 1913 extreme has occasionally been questioned, most recently in 2016 by meteorologist and weather historian Christopher C. Burt in an analysis for the Weather Underground. Burt argued the 1913 record was "essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective" when compared to other readings in that area that year, and was likely observer error.
Another claim to the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, a staggering 58°C recorded at El Azizia, Libya, in 1922 stood for more than 90 years before being officially disallowed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), also due to apparent observer error.
The WMO has accepted Sunday's reading on a preliminary basis, pending verification. But as for whether it's the hottest-ever, the WMO is somewhat cagey, saying only that, if verified, Sunday's temperature would be the hottest "officially" recorded since 1931. That appears to refer to a temperature of 55°C recorded at a site in Tunisia that year, though like other records from the colonial era, it, too, is in dispute.
World-record or not, all of these would-be contenders are head and shoulders higher than Canada's hottest weather record: A reading of 45°C shared by the Saskatchewan communities of Midale and Yellow Grass on July 5th, 1937.
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