Death Valley officially the hottest place ever
Death Valley in California's Mojave Desert has been awarded the most extreme temperature ever recorded, 99 years after the reading was taken.
Death Valley in California's Mojave Desert has been awarded the most extreme temperature ever recorded, 99 years after the reading was taken Photo: Alamy
By Helena Kaznowska 6:45PM BST 13 Sep 201279
During the summer of 1913, 134F heat was recorded in Death Valley, California, but was tipped by world-record temperature extreme of 136.4F, recorded in El Azizia, Libya, on Sept. 13, 1922.
However, the American temperature has regained its title after an international team removed the world record from the former Italian army base in Libya, exactly 90 years after it was awarded.
Meteorologists finished a detailed investigation and discovered that the 1922 event was conducted by an inexperienced observer who had not received full training. Using an unsuitable instrument that could have easily been misread, the meteorologist incorrectly recorded the temperature, according to investigators. As a result, the original reading can be seen to suffer from an inaccuracy of an estimated 12.6F.
Rapporteur of Climate and Weather Extremes for the World Meteorological Organisation and Arizona State University President's Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences, Randy Cerveny, said, "We found systematic errors in the 1922 reading."
The instrument used in Azizia was similar to everyday maximum-minimum thermometers, which record the day's highest and lowest temperatures on each side of a U-shaped glass tube of mercury. The temperature, if read from the top of the pin rather than the bottom, would be wrong.
Suspicions rose when the world record temperature could be seen as an anomaly among other recorded values near the El Azizia location, roughly 35 miles southwest of Tripoli.
"When we compared his observations to surrounding areas and to other measurements made before and after the 1922 reading, they simply didn't match up," Cerveny said. "This change to the record books required significant sleuthing and a lot of forensic records work."
Investigators concluded that there were enough questions surrounding the measurement to deem the recording inaccurate, overturning 90-year-old record.
A full report by the international team is to appear in the Bulletin of the American Meterological Society.
