Incredible 54.4 ° C! It may be an all-time high on Earth that fell this weekend. And it was in the famous Death Valley, Death Valley, in California in the United States that it was recorded. At Furnace Creek, the aptly named “Furnace Creek”, a weather station recorded a temperature peak of 130 ° F (54.4 ° C).
“If the measurement is correct, it would be a world record for heat,” underlines Etienne Kapikian from Météo France in a tweet. This statement is for the moment provisional, it is being verified by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the official American agency.
Death Valley, and particularly the Furnace Creek weather station, are renowned for their extreme weather. The absolute temperature record on Earth would have already been recorded there on July 10, 1913, with 134 ° F or 56.66 ° C, but at the time, the measurements were not always very reliable. In any case, according to Étienne Kapikian, it is also in Furnace Creek, that the previous reliable and absolute temperature record had been measured: it was June 30, 2013, with 54 ° C (129.2 ° F) observed. .
50 ° C in spades this summer
But Death Valley does not have a monopoly on these extreme temperatures. At the end of July, several cities in the Middle East, notably in Iraq and Kuwait, experienced temperatures exceeding 50 ° C: 52.8 ° C at the Basra airport on July 30, when Baghdad reached over 51 ° C. . In Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where temperatures are soaring like everywhere in the Gulf, we are even cooling the swimming pools with… ice cubes.
In France, the absolute temperature record only dates from last year. It was established on June 28, 2019, with 46 ° C in Vérargues in the Gard (Editor's note: now renamed Entre-Vignes after a merger with the neighboring town) . But in Île-de-France, the record for the highest temperature ever recorded during the month of August was broken this year, on August 9 in Villaines, in Val-d'Oise (39.2 ° C against 38.8 ° C on August 12, 2003) and equaled the same day in Creil, in the Oise, with 39.1 ° C.
Météo France has just announced in a tweet that the first half of August, with a national average of 24.1 ° C, was the hottest ever recorded after that of 2003. Stating that it “ was exceptional in Hauts-de-France with an excess of +5 ° C in Lille, Abbeville or Saint-Quentin or in the Paris region with +4.7 ° C in Paris. "
🌡️ The first half of August is the second hottest ever recorded with a national average of 24.1 ° C or 3 ° C above normal
(3 ° C less than in 2003).
📸 @infoclimat pic.twitter.com/CU4VA2PnAs
According to the simulations carried out for the Parisian by Météo France on the basis of the most pessimistic scenario established by the IPCC, that of "let it go", we can expect the thermometer to climb in Paris to 44.1 ° C during heatwaves in August 2050. A furnace that is not unlike that of the valley of death.