California sizzles as temperatures hit record highs

AFP

California sizzled to a temperature so hot that meteorologists need to verify it as a planetwide record.

Death Valley recorded a scorching 54.4 degrees Celsius on Sunday, which if the sensors and other conditions check out, would be the hottest Earth has been in more than 89 years and the third-warmest ever measured.

The temperature, measured at the aptly-named Furnace Creek during a blistering heat wave, would be the hottest temperature recorded on Earth in August, said Arizona State University professor Randy Cerveny, who coordinates the World Meteorological Organization’s extreme temperature team, which is already investigating the mark.

That only below the disputed all-time record of 56.67 degrees Celsius at nearly the same spot in 1913 and 55 degrees Celsius in Tunisia in 1931, but both were in July.

The relentlessly hot weather at the spot support such an extreme reading, so much of the verification will be looking at how the measurement was taken and the sensor itself, Cerveny said. Sunday’s temperature would beat marks of 53.9 degrees Celsius recorded three times in recent years, he said. The monitor is an official one that follows world guidelines, but still needs to be examined in a process that takes months.

“We are having more extremes than we had in the past,” Cerveny said.

The world is “creeping up on (the record) year after year. That is something that cannot be denied,” Cerveny said. “These extremes tell us a lot about what will happen in the future.”

The western heatwave is due to a “massive dome of high pressure” that keeps roasting the West and the normal Southwest monsoon that would provide rain and relief is missing, so there has been no cooling, Cerveny said. Phoenix has gone weeks with temperatures not dipping below 32.2 degrees Celsius, even at night or early in the morning, he said.

The 54.4-degree-Celsius mark capped a week and an ongoing summer of “very strange” weather, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Weather Service’s Center for Weather and Climate and former chairman of the US national weather extremes committee.

On Saturday, a fire tornado formed during a wildfire in California, worsened by the western heat wave. The fire was “burning so incredibly intense, so there is just so much heat going into it” that air rose in a swirl just like what happens in some thunderstorms, said Dawn Johnson, senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Nevada.

Days before that, a violent straight-wind devastated parts of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, killing four people and causing billions of dollars in damages. Also, the Atlantic keeps setting records for earliest hurricanes, with 11 forming before mid-August and the beginning of peak season.

“These kinds of things are certainly consistent with everybody’s expectation for what we expect to see more often” with man-made global warming, said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.