Nawabshah may have endured hottest April temperature recorded on Earth

NAWABSHAH: Temperatures soared to 50.2° Celsius in Nawabshah, Sindh on Monday in what might just be the highest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth during April.

A meteorologist at Meteo France, Etienne Kapikian, posted the observation on Twitter.

Kapikian’s tweet claimed that it was the warmest April temperature ever recorded in Pakistan and the entire Asian continent.

Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) Director General Dr Ghulam Rasool confirmed to Geo News that the temperature in Nawabshah on Monday (April 30) was the highest ever recorded in Pakistan in the month of April.

The PMD DG, however, said he could not comment on world temperatures.

Washington Post quoted Christopher Burt, an expert on global weather extremes, as saying it was probably also the highest temperature “yet reliably observed on Earth in modern records.”

The competing hottest April temperature of 51.0° Celsius set in Santa Rosa, Mexico, in April 2001, is “of dubious reliability,” Burt said.

The Washington Post report added that we may never be able to say definitively that Nawabshah’s 50.2° Celsius is a world April record because the World Meteorological Organisation does not conduct official reviews of such monthly temperature extremes.

However, Randy Cerveny, who serves as rapporteur for the agency’s committee on extreme records, said he would trust Burt’s statement. “He’s pretty thorough about those things,” Cerveny said in an email to the Washington Post.

Further according to reports, the heat coupled with hours-long load-shedding caused dozens of people to faint in the city.

This is the second straight month in which Nawabshah has set a new monthly temperature record for Pakistan.