A massive heat dome was parked over Western Australia, with Onslow sitting directly underneath it. Temperatures were about 20 degrees Fahrenheit (11 degrees Celsius) above normal at the hottest time of year.
“Considering the increasing temperature trends over the past decades, it is less surprising that we see extreme temperatures like the one in Western Australia at the moment,” wrote Nina Ridder, researcher at the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of New South Wales at Sydney.
The extreme temperature arrives the same week that several of the world’s top climate research institutions announced the past seven years have been the hottest in recorded history. In that time, temperature records have been broken across the world. The WMO has four ongoing investigations, having just completed another.
“Since the creation of the WMO World Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes in 2007, we have never had so many ongoing verification/evaluations as we currently do,” Randy Cerveny, who leads the World Meteorological Organization’s weather and climate extremes team, wrote in an email.