Extract from ABC News
It's looking like the mantle for the hottest temperature reliably recorded on Earth could be under threat again this weekend as the US faces another blast of extreme heat.
While we wait to see just how hot it will get, this is a glance into the surprisingly fraught history of recording the hottest temperature on Earth.
Stationed in El Azizia, Libya in 1922, it appears an Italian soldier was not paying a huge degree of attention while being instructed on how to take the daily temperature readings.
It was undoubtedly unpleasantly hot and how much could the temperature at a remote desert outpost possibly matter anyway?
The unidentified soldier would not have had the slightest inkling that his error a few days later would result in the record for the hottest air temperature on Earth being wrong for 90 years.
It would go uncorrected, despite various mutterings over the years, until the World Meteorological Organization put together a special international panel of meteorological experts to conduct an in-depth investigation into the recording. From which they published a wonderfully detailed report in 2013.
The loaded gun, as it were, was the original recording sheet.
Two days before the entry in question the handwriting changes, indicating a new man on the job.
Not ony did he mix up the columns for recording maximum and minimum temperatures, the team hypothesise he was also reading the thermometer incorrectly when he marked down the scorching 58.0 degrees Celsius — presumably unbeknownst to the soldier, the highest temperature ambient air temperature ever recorded on Earth.
The type of thermometer thought to be used at the time was the Bellani-Six thermometer.
It
is a handy tool because it has bars that mark the highest and lowest
temperatures reached across a day, rather than having to constantly
watch the thermometer.
There are various accuracy caveats with this type of thermometer, but the big issue on September 13, 1922, seems to have been that the soldier was likely reading from the top end of the bar, rather than the bottom.
Alongside other issues, the report states this probably led to around a 7C error.
The report also concludes the temperature did not match up with other readings, either at that station or in nearby areas.
They also note the recording site in 1922, on a "concrete-coated plaza of a small military fort on a hill," could have artificially raised the temperature.
But at its core, this error appears to have been a simple mistake and a cautionary tale to consider the next time your mind starts to wander during seemingly inconsequential and dull workplace training.
So what is the record?
Once the 1922 Libyan recording was deemed invalid, the mantle of the hottest temperature on Earth got passed to Death Valley in the US, where it reportedly reached 56.7C (134F) at the aptly named Furnace Creek recording site on July 7, 1913.
Although now accepted, this record also has a few question marks around it.
Even the official temperature record website run by the Americans admits there may have been a sandstorm at the time, which could have altered the reading.
So ignoring that one, the next on the list is 55C recorded in Tunisia in 1931, but this value is also widely considered to be a bit dodgy.
To finally get to some readings which don't make meteorologists wince, we have to drop to 54.0C.
This temperature has been verified in three different locations: Furnace Creek on June 13, 2013, Mitribah in Kuwait on July 21, 2016, and Turbat in Pakistan on May 28, 2017, albeit with various margins of error.
To add another spanner to the mix there was further excitement last year when on August 18, 2020, it got up to 54.4C (130F) at Furnace Creek, which would beat out those more reputable values. The 2020 recording has yet to be verified by the World Meteorological Organisation.
For the record, the highest temperature verified in Australia and the southern hemisphere was 50.7C, at Oodnadatta on January 2, 1960.
So in the coming days the fancy new electric thermometers would need to top 54.4C (130F) or at least 54.0C (129.2F), then wait a few years to be verified, before officially becoming the hottest temperature reliably recorded on Earth.
Or if they could beat 56.7C or 58C, it would certainly clear things up a bit. But that is unlikely given the current forecast of 129F (53.9C) at Furnace Creek on Sunday.
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