Toasty! Death Valley Hits 130F (54.4C) Monday 7/12; May Be Highest Reliably Recorded Temperature
Excessive heat warnings remained in place across swathes of the western US on Monday after Death Valley in California registered what could prove to be the highest reliably recorded temperature on Earth.
After a cascade of record heatwaves in Canada, north-west US, northern Europe and Siberia, the severity of the hot spell has underlined the dangerous impact of human-caused climate disruption and prompted scientists to consider whether computer models may have underestimated the impacts.
The US National Weather Service measured the temperature at Furnace Creek in Death Valley on Saturday at 54.4C (130F). If confirmed, this would equal the record set at the same place last year and rival slightly higher measurements made more than 100 years ago when equipment was less precise.The heat spike was protracted as well as steep. For three days in a row, Furnace Creek sweltered in maximum temperatures of over 53.3C. There was little respite at night where the lows never fell below 32C.
The scorching weather affected a far wider area. Records were broken in several other Californian and Nevadan communities, including Palm Springs and Palmdale. Combined with an exceptionally severe drought, this has also provided tinderbox conditions for wildfires. In southern Oregon the Bootleg Fire, which has raged since Tuesday, has scorched 224 sq miles (58,000 hectares), threatened more than 1,000 homes and prompted evacuation orders in Klamath County.
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Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the flurry of broken records fitted computer projections of how the climate will behave as a result of rising human emissions in the atmosphere. “Despite being astonishing in visceral terms, they are not surprising in scientific terms. They are very much in line with predictions about what will happen in a warming world,” he said. “There is some level of astonishment at the pace at which records have been broken in recent weeks, but in some ways what we have seen in Death Valley – an all-time reliable heat record – is less extraordinary than some of the other records we saw in Canada and the north-west, where records were exceeded by such a large margin that they left people dumbfounded.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/12/health-warnings-as-death-valley-scorches-in-544c-heat