WORLD
Death Valley officially the hottest place ever
Baku, September 14 (AZERTAC). For nearly a century the Mediterranean city of El Azizia in northern Libya has held the official title for having been the hottest place on Earth ever recorded.
But the world record was taken away on Thursday after an investigation by the World Meteorological Organization found the measurement was probably bungled by someone who misread a thermometer.
A panel of experts convened by the WMO raised five serious concerns over the historic claim that the mercury reached 58C in 1922 at what was then an Italian army base on the Libyan coast. The inquiry began in 2010, but was suspended when Khalid El Fadii, who played a leading role as director of the Libyan National Meteorological Centre, went silent for eight months after fleeing Tripoli during the recent revolution. He later resumed the work.
Doubt was cast over the Libyan record when the group ruled it was inconsistent with subsequent measurements taken at the same site and at nearby weather stations. The reading was also taken over an asphalt surface, which would be hotter than its desert surroundings, and the operator was likely inexperienced and using equipment that was already obsolete in 1922, the inquiry concluded.
A full report by the international team, which included climate scientists from Britain's Met Office, and the US, is to appear in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
In striking out the Libyan record – after 90 years to the day – the title of the hottest ever place on Earth passes to Death Valley in California, where the temperature reached 56.7C in 1913, the WMO said.
The record has been amended in the meteorologists' equivalent of the Guinness Book of Records, known as the WMO Commission of Climatology World Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes.