Temperatures in Death Valley, which runs along part of central California’s border with Nevada, reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit (53.33 degrees Celsius) Sunday at the aptly named Furnace Creek, the National Weather Service said.
Five people died in Pennsylvania on Saturday when heavy rains caused a flash flood that swept away several cars. A nine-month-old boy and a two-year-old girl remained missing. In Vermont, authorities feared landslides as rain continued after days of flooding.
The brutal temperatures in Death Valley come amid a blistering heat wave that has put roughly one-third of Americans under some type of heat advisory, watch or warning. Heat waves are not as visually dramatic as other natural disasters, but experts say they are more deadly. A heat wave in parts of the South and Midwest killed more than a dozen people last month.
Residents in the western US have long been accustomed to extreme temperatures, and the heat appeared to cause minimal disruption in California over the weekend. Local governments have opened cooling centers for people without access to air conditioning to stay cool. The heat forced officials to cancel horse racing on the opening weekend of the California State Fair, as officials urged fairgoers to stay hydrated and seek respite in one of the seven air-conditioned buildings.
Temperatures in Las Vegas reached 115 degrees F (46.11 degrees C) early Sunday afternoon, approaching the desert city’s all-time high of 117 degrees. Temperatures in Phoenix reached 112 degrees F (44.4 C) early Sunday afternoon, the 17th straight day of 110 degrees or higher. The record is 18 days, set in June 1974. Phoenix is on track to break that record Tuesday, said Gabriel Lojero, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Temperature records are being broken across the southern US, from California to Florida. But it is much more than that. It’s global, with devastating heat hitting Europe along with dramatic flooding in the North East of the US, India, Japan and China. The world was in uncharted hot territory for most of July, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.
June was also the warmest June on record, according to several weather agencies. Scientists say there is a decent chance that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, with measurements going back to the mid-1800s. Death Valley dominates global temperature records. In the valley it is not only hot, but also brutally hot.
Some meteorologists have questioned how accurate the 110-year-old Death Valley temperature record is, weather historian Christopher Burt disputed this for several reasons, which he outlined in a blog post a few years ago.
The two hottest temperatures on record are 134 F in 1913 in Death Valley and 131 F (55 degrees C) in Tunisia in July 1931. Burt, a weather historian for The Weather Company, finds error in both of these measurements and reports 130 F (54.4 C) in July 2021 in Death Valley as its highest recorded temperature on Earth. “130 degrees is very rare, if not unique,” Burt said.
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