UN weather agency seeks to confirm 48.8°C ‘record’ heat spike in Sicily

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that it could not yet corroborate oregon contradict the Sicilian somesthesia spike, which was recorded connected Wednesday by an cultivation forecasting supplier connected the island, and not the authoritative Italian upwind service.

Temperature check

“We cannot yet marque immoderate preliminary appraisal of the 48.8 °C observation, pro oregon con,” the WMO said successful a connection via email, lone days aft the Intergovernmental Panel connected Climate Change (IPCC) issued a study highlighting the “indisputable” interaction of quality enactment connected utmost upwind events.

WMO said that a rapid-response upwind records squad is present successful interaction with the Sicilian upwind work successful bid to determine if the reflection beats Europe’s existing precocious of 48 Celsius /118.4 Fahrenheit, which happened successful Athens connected 10 July, 1977.

Alert successful Algeria

The improvement comes amid caller heatwave alerts and concerns implicit wildfires successful Algeria, wherever the nationalist upwind work forecast temperatures of astatine slightest 44 Celsius/111.2 Fahrenheit, with highs of possibly 47 Celsius/116.6 Fahrenheit.

The grade of the monolithic wood blazes successful the northbound African state was intelligibly disposable from abstraction and published connected Tuesday by NASA.

One image, captured by the Aqua satellite, showed a immense plume of fume implicit bluish Algeria, wherever much than 62,000 hectares person burned truthful acold this year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

NASA’s Earth Observatory noted that immoderate of the worst fires had been successful mountainous areas adjacent Bejaia and Tizi-Ouzou, and that the agleam achromatic portions of the fume plume suggested the beingness of pyrocumulonimbus “fire clouds”.

Code red

In effect to the IPCC Working Group’s study connected Monday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that is was "a codification reddish for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the grounds is irrefutable."

In caller days and weeks, hundreds of wildfires person raged successful Italy, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Russia and the occidental United States.

And according to WMO, the record-breaking heatwave successful parts of the US and Canada successful June would person been virtually intolerable without the power of human-caused clime change.

Unsplash/Marcus Kauffman

A wildfire burns successful a nationalist parkland successful Oregon, USA.

Heatwave ‘150 times much likely’

The UN bureau besides insisted that clime alteration caused by expanding greenhouse state emissions - specified arsenic c dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - made the heatwave “at slightest 150 times much apt to happen”.

Highlighting “unprecedented” heatwaves recorded successful the Western United States and Canada this summer, WMO explained that these had coincided with “unusual” upwind patterns implicit the full of the bluish Hemisphere.

“This has brought unprecedented heat, droughts, acold and bedewed conditions successful assorted places,” said Dr Omar Baddour, caput of WMO’s Climate Monitoring and Policy Division. “The transportation of this large-scale disturbance of (the) summertime play with the warming of Arctic and the vigor accumulation successful the water needs to beryllium investigated.”