November 18, 2016 Death Valley Temperature Record Blog on WU

If you have looked through my web site, then you have probably come across my write-ups on the world’s record high temperature of 134F in Death Valley in 1913.  There are now five separate Stormbruiser “posts” dedicated to my research of the record.  Of course, I believe that the 134F temperature is invalid.   This link will take you to Part One of the study, and from there you can access the other parts.

Back in the summer of 2016 I was contacted by Chris Burt, a climatologist who researches world weather records and writes for the Weather Underground (WU) web site.  Chris and I had met at Furnace Creek in Death Valley on July 10, 2013, the 100th anniversary of the 134F report.  The National Park Service and National Weather Service were holding a “celebration” of sorts at the Visitors Center to commemorate the high temperature reading.  Chris and I discussed the record temperature briefly, and he was somewhat skeptical of it.   When I spoke with Chris in July, he said that he had read through my study on my web site here, and that he was now convinced that the 134F report was not authentic.  He proposed that I submit a shorter and tighter version of my study for the Weather Underground site — I would be a “guest blogger” and the write-up would be in his regular blog spot, and I would receive full credit, of course.  We worked together for several months on it, and the final version was posted in late October 2016:

An Investigation of Death Valley’s 134F World Record Temperature

A couple of newspapers picked up on the WU blog post, including the Washington Post and the Las Vegas Journal Review.

The ultimate goal is to have at the 134F record closely scrutinized by a committee of expert meteorologists and climatologists, and of course for them to come to the conclusion that the record is not valid.  The next step for Chris and myself is to prepare an article for a well-respected weather journal, such as the Monthly Weather Review.  The article would be peer-reviewed, and if it passes muster and gets published, then that would (or should) result in an official assessment by the “record review” committee.  Chris was the one who got the ball rolling for the dismissal of the 136F report from Libya in 1922.  That temperature was struck from the record books by the committee in 2012.