Nawabshah on Monday, with a temperature of 122.4 degrees (50.2 Celsius) became the hottest city on Earth during April.
Nawabshah had the highest temperature ever reliably measured on the planet for the month of April, according to The Washington Post, which cited Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist at Meteo France.
Kapikian’s tweeted that it was the warmest April temperature ever recorded in Pakistan and for the entire Asian continent.
Christopher Burt, an expert on global weather extremes, went a step further. In an email he said it probably was also the highest temperature “yet reliably observed on Earth in modern records.”
The competing hottest April temperature of 123.8 degrees (51.0 Celsius) set in Santa Rosa, Mexico, in April 2001, is “of dubious reliability,” Burt said.
We may never be able to say definitively that Nawabshah’s 122.4 degrees is a world April record because the World Meteorological Organization does not conduct official reviews of such monthly temperature extremes. But Randy Cerveny, who serves as rapporteur for the agency’s committee on extreme records, said that he would trust Burt’s take. “He’s pretty thorough about those things,” Cerveny said.
This is the second straight month in which Nawabshah has set a new monthly temperature record for Pakistan. In late March, a heat wave pushed the temperature there to a national record of 113.9 degrees for the month. Several other countries in Asia also established March record highs during the hot spell from the 29th to the 31st.
April’s heat wave, coming just 30 days later, resulted from a sprawling heat dome centred over the northern Indian Ocean.