The temperature in Death Valley hit 130 degrees at 3:41 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. If verified, the reading would break Death Valley’s previous August record by three degrees, the Weather Service tweeted.
“Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that is a legitimate observation,” Randy Cerveny, who leads the World Meteorological Organization’s weather and climate extremes team, wrote in an email. “I am recommending that the World Meteorological Organization preliminarily accept the observation. In the upcoming weeks, we will, of course, be examining it in detail, along with the U.S. National Climate Extremes Committee, using one of our international evaluation teams.”
Death Valley famously holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, which is 134 degrees. This record was set on July 10, 1913. However, that measurement is very much in question; an extensive analysis of that record conducted in 2016 by Christopher Burt, an expert on extreme weather data, concluded it was “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective.”
Some climatologists consider 129-degree readings recorded in Death Valley on June 30, 2013, and in Kuwait and Pakistan in 2016 and 2017, respectively, as the highest ever reliably measured on the planet. If only those readings are considered, then Sunday’s 130-degree temperature would unseat them as the highest measured.