The Iranian city of Ahvaz, home to 1.1 million people, might have tied the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth on Thursday, The Washington Post reports.
The hottest reliably measured temperatures on Earth were in Mitribah, Kuwait, on July 21, 2016, and Death Valley, California, on June 30, 2013, both reaching 129.2 degrees. The Weather Underground indicates Ahvaz reached 129.2 degrees twice on Thursday, at 4:51 p.m. and 5 p.m., although the temperature still needs to be officially verified by the World Meteorological Organization.
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As the temperature climbed into the high 120s [in Ahvaz on Thursday], the dew point, a measure of humidity, peaked in the low 70s; a high level for the desert location (due to moist air flow from the Persian Gulf, to the south). The heat index — a measure of how hot it feels factoring in the humidity — exceeded 140 degrees. This combination of heat and humidity was so extreme that it was beyond levels the heat index was designed to compute. [The Washington Post]
Technically speaking, the highest temperature on record was 134 degrees on July 1, 1913, in Death Valley, but extreme weather historian Christopher Burt of the Weather Underground believes the measurement was inaccurate and "essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective." Read more about the blistering weather in Iran at The Washington Post.
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