There’s a short meteorology article out talking about the hottest places on Earth. Turns out that desert temperatures can be higher than I ever realised:
But then the paper has a local surprise:The Lut Desert, located in southeast Iran has long been regarded as one of the hottest places on Earth. Numerous studies have examined the relationship between the expression of severe thermal temperature across this hyper-arid landscape and the unique natural physical characteristics of the Lut, such as the wind-sculpted mega-yardangs, and the vast areas of closely packed rock fragments known as desert pavement (Alavipanah 2007; Azizi et al. 2007). The Lut Desert was determined to be the hottest spot on Earth in two of three years previously evaluated with the Aqua/MODIS satellite LST data (Mildrexler et al. 2006). Here we found that the Lut Desert had the highest surface temperature on Earth in 2004 (68.0°C; 154.4°F), 2005 (70.7°C;159.3°F), 2006 (68.5°C; 155.3°F), 2007 (69.0°C; 156.2°F) and 2009 (68.6°C; 155.5°F), five of the seven years analyzed in this study. The Lut is the only place on Earth to have a surface temperature above 70°C (158°F) and regularly has the largest, contiguous area of surface temperatures above 65°C of anywhere on Earth (Fig. 2).
In 2003 a scorching temperature of 69.3°C (156.7°F), the second highest temperature of the seven-year dataset, was detected in the province of Queensland, Australia. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth with vast arid lands where annual maximum LSTs routinely exceed 60°C.
So, Queensland has recently had a temperature just a fraction under 70 degrees. Amazing.
UPDATE: my bad. As noted in the comment, the article is not talking about air temperature, the hottest measured record of which still seems to be 58 degrees in Libya. I thought that the article was talking about desert air temperatures measured by satellite, but it is talking about "skin temperature", which can be way higher than the air temperature.
Well, that explains why the temperatures seemed extraordinarily high to me. Must not post so quickly.
1 comment:
Just a word of caution - this study is using Land Surface Temperature (LST), not comparable to the temperatures you get on the weather bulletin. To quote the authors, "However, satellites do not measure the near-surface
air temperature; instead they measure the radiometric surface temperature, or skin temperature, a
different physical parameter"
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