Australia swelters in extreme weather as one town breaks heat record

Australians will be cranking up the pedestal fans, as extreme heatwave conditions sear across most of the country.

Temperatures have soared above average across much of the continent, peaking at 49.1°C (120.38°F) in the town of Marble Bar in Western Australia, according to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).

“This is the face of climate change,” Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a Belgian climate scientist and former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in a tweet earlier this week.

Since Tuesday, severe to extreme heatwave conditions have been affecting the country, with the highest intensity areas including Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory, and inland Victoria, the BOM reports. Queensland has been experiencing low intensity conditions.

The heatwave has expanded across South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and even northeast Tasmania, and is expected to remain static over the weekend before reducing intensity by Monday.

That staggering top 49.1°C (120.38°F) temperature recorded in the former gold mining town of Marble Bar — which battles it out with the town of Wyndham for the title of the hottest place in Australia on average — marks the hottest day since folks started recording the temperature there in 1901.

To put it in perspective, the highest temperature ever recorded in Australia is 50.7°C (123.26°F), recorded in 1960 at South Australia’s Oodnadatta Airport. The official highest recorded temperature in the world is 56.7°C (134°F), which was measured at Greenland Ranch, Death Valley, California on Jul. 10, 1913. 

These extreme temperatures are way above average for Australia’s south in particular at this time of the year. A representative from the BOM told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that most of the country’s southeast had been experiencing temperatures “10 to 14 degrees above average for this time of the year.”

As a result of the extremely high temperatures combined with dry and windy conditions, fire warnings have been issued for parts of Western Australia, South Australia, and Victoria.

It’s not the only extreme heat event Australia has experienced of late. Three blistering heat waves enveloped much of southeastern Australia in January and February 2017. In 2018, Sydney alone saw its hottest day in 80 years in January, and an unseasonably warm April saw heat records broken and below average rainfall across the country, leading to a devastating drought for New South Wales.

In fact, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef will never be the same following the devastating marine heat wave of 2015 and 2016.

As climate change continues to rear its undeniable head — despite the Australian government’s lack of action to tackle it — we can expect more extreme weather events like this up ahead.