The normal high temperature for the day is around minus-56, which puts the March 18 reading at around 70 degrees warmer than normal.
If the World Meteorological Organization actually tracked this particular metric, scientists say it would likely set a world record.
It “appears to have set a new World Record for the largest temperature excess above normal … ever measured at an established weather station,” Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, tweeted Monday.
Randall Cerveny, a professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University and the Rapporteur on Extreme Records for the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN this kind of record — how far above or below normal a temperature is — is not something the WMO tracks or verifies.
But even so, he said, this reading looks legit.
“Everything that I personally have seen about the Dome C observation suggests that it is a legitimate observation,” Cerveny told CNN.
While 11 degrees is not warm by any stretch, it is unheard of for this part of Antarctica, and 70 degrees above average is similarly astounding.
It would be as if the high temperature in Washington, DC, on Monday — normally 61 degrees — was an unthinkable 131 degrees. In reality, the warmest it’s ever been there on March 28 was 85 degrees.
The coldest place on Earth?
And it wasn’t the only location to set record high temperatures that day.
Vostok, the Russian research base famous for logging the coldest temperature in the world, reported a high temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit — 63 degrees warmer than the…
Source : cnn
