A temperature of 54.4C – or 129.9F – has been recorded in Death Valley, California, in what some extreme weather watchers believe could be the hottest reading ever reliably recorded on the planet. The United States National Weather Service’s automated weather station at Furnace Creek near the border with Nevada hit the extreme high at 3:41pm on Sunday afternoon, a statement said.“This observed high temperature is considered preliminary and not yet official,” a statement from NWS Las Vegas said.“If verified, this will be the hottest temperature officially verified since July of 1913, also at Death Valley.”If the temperature reading is verified, it would beat the previous hottest August day for the United States. Death Valley’s all-time record high, according to the World Meteorological Organization, is 134F (56.7°C) taken on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch. That reading still stands as the hottest ever recorded on the planet’s surface, according to the WMO. The Death Valley 1913 reading was installed as the planet’s hottest after a 2013 WMO investigation dismissed a 58C temperature supposedly recorded in Libya in September 1922. A committee concluded the Libya reading was likely wrong with human-error, the type of thermometer used and inconsistencies with other temperatures in the region all contributing to that temperature being struck off. But Christopher Burt, from private US meteorological service and who prompted the investigation into the Libya record, has also challenged the legitimacy of the 1913 Death Valley readings saying they were “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective.”Speaking to the Washington Post, Prof Randy Cerveny, of Arizona State University and who leads a WMO group that maintains an archive of climate extremes, said of the new Death Valley temperature reading: “Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that is a legitimate observation.


All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/17/death-valley-temperature-rises-to-544c-possibly-the-hottest-ever-reliably-recorded

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