RON'S FOOTLOOSE COLUMN - HOW HOT IS HOT?
Footloose - How Hot is Hot? (December 2007)
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We’ve just spent a couple of days travelling through some bare barren desert in Sudan with the temperature hovering around the 50°C mark. To say it was hot is an understatement! To stand out in the direct sun was a bleaching desiccating experience where you could almost feel the moisture being sucked from you. But the wind, which blew most of the time, was the real scorcher, seemingly coming from a furnace – or the bowels of hell!
The air-conditioning in the car was flat out keeping up (in fact our A/C had given up the ghost completely) while our trusty Engel fridge battled to keep cabinet temperatures in single figures. In fact, if you went to the fridge the on-board thermometer let you know that the temperature inside the cabinet would jump 5-10 degrees in the 30 seconds or so the fridge was opened.
When the temperature dropped to the low 40s in the late evening you could be forgiven thinking that weather was pleasantly balmy. Maybe we were just that instead!
I well remember the first time we were in temperatures of 50° plus, some 20 years ago. We were again in north Africa travelling by overland truck across the inhospitable desert from the Red Sea to the Nile and a thermometer in a shady area of the back was calibrated to 50°, while having about 15mm of tubing at the top unmarked. At some time in that dreadful afternoon, with the old Bedford pushing into a scorching headwind and where all of us in the ‘shady’ back had gone into survival mode, the thermometer burst! Arriving at the Nile we were told it was 52°C - but to us it felt cool amongst the palm trees and surrounded by the lush green of vegetation fed and cooled by the waters of the Nile. How hot was it out in the bare desert in that wind? Who knows!
I haven’t been in those sorts of temperatures in Australia although we’ve endured plenty of days in the mid 40s and even a couple in the high 40s, but the jump to the 50s is a big one. So, how hot is hot?
Well, the hottest temperature ever officially recorded anywhere on earth was 58°C (136°F) in 1922 when the temperature reached this scorcher at El Azizia in Libya, again in north Africa. Death Valley in the USA has the record for that continent with a temperature of just over 56°C, or 134°F in 1913. Australia is not really far behind any of those with the hottest temperature being recorded of 53.1°C (127.6°F) at Cloncurry, Qld, in January 1889 (were they thinking of ‘climate change’ back then, I wonder?).
The trouble is we have no ‘official’ weather stations or even a thermometer out in what would be our hottest areas of the northern Simpson Desert, or in the Great Sandy or Little Sandy Desert of WA. With our hottest temperature being recorded at Cloncurry, it would be easy to suggest that temperatures in the north Simpson or elsewhere in the deserts of WA could be that high on a more regular basis, or could even reach a much higher figure. The same could be said for the desert sands of North Africa so I don’t think we’ll ever hold the record of the hottest place on earth, but it would be interesting to know if a place ever records a temperature of 60°C. I don’t think I’d like to be there though!
I know that there are a few keen adventurers amongst us who head out to cross the Simpson Desert in summer. It’s not what we’d recommend as not only is the ambient temperature so high but the sand dries and becomes like fine powder making it extremely hard work on a vehicle that is already suffering from heat overload. Still, if anyone has done it and recorded ambient temperatures in the 50s, I’d love to hear about them.
For my money though, I’d prefer temperatures that hover around the high 20s, low 30s - that’s why I tackle the Simpson in winter. We’d suggest you do your desert travel then too!