Death Valley lived longer than its name on Sunday, when the mercury in the well-known village of Furnace Creek rose to a blazing 130 degrees – possibly the highest recorded temperature on Earth, according to a report.
The sizzling reading was reached at 3:41 p.m. from a historic heat wave in the West, according to the National Weather Service. If checked, Death Valley’s previous August record would break by three degrees, the Washington Post reported.
It would also be among the top-three highest temps ever measured on Earth – and could, in fact, be the highest, according to the newspaper.
“Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that this is a legitimate observation,” Randy Cerveny, who leads the Meteorological Organization’s weather and climate extreme team, told the Washington Post in an email .
“I recommend that the World Meteorological Organization take the observation in advance. In the coming weeks, we will, of course, examine it in detail, together with the U.S. National Committee on Climate Extremes, with one of our international evaluation teams, “added Cerven.
Caroline Rohe, a park ranger at Death Valley National Park, posted a photo of the stratospheric reading on a thermometer at the visitor center.
‘Could be a world record temperature! We hit 130 degrees at Death Valley today. (The visitor center’s thermometer runs 3-4 degrees warmer.), ”She wrote.
The desert in Eastern California holds the record for the warmest temperature ever recorded on the planet – 134 degrees, which the U.S. Water Bureau recorded on July 10, 1913 at Furnace Creek.
However, that measurement remains in hot dispute.
In 2016, Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded that it was “essentially impossible from a meteorological perspective,” the reports reported.
Some experts believe that the 129 degrees recorded in Death Valley on June 30, 2013, and in Kuwait and Pakistan in 2016 and 2017, respectively, are the highest ever measured reliably on Earth.
If the 130 degrees recorded Sunday is confirmed, it would be the highest temperature officially on the planet since 1931, and the third-highest since 1873, according to the Washington Post.
The only two higher ones included the 1913 lecture in Death Valley and a 131-degree mark from Kebili, Tunisia, of July 7, 1931, which also had “serious credibility issues,” Burt told the paper.
Furnace Creek, located at 190 feet below sea level in the Mojave Desert, is famous for its scorching heat.
In July 2018, its average temperature of 108.1 degrees made it the warmest month ever measured on Earth. In that month, it hit at least 120 degrees for three weeks.
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