On Jun 13, 4:27 am, "Philip Eden" philipATweatherHYPHENukDOTcom
wrote:
"Stephen Burt" wrote :
On 11 Jun, 19:42, Bonos Ego wrote:

Does anyone know what the hottest temperature recorded / location is
in Europe?

GFS is forecasting 42c / 43c for South East Europe around 27June.

Riodades (Alto Doura) in central/north Portugal apparently measured
the highest temperature in Europe at 50.6°C (Christopher Burt, Extreme
Weather, Norton 2004, p 26 - no, he is no relation, that I know of
anyway :-) ), but I don't know how accurate the figure is nor the date
when it was recorded. Much of the other information in his book is
pretty reliable though, more so for the US rather than ROW it has to
be said. Can anyone else can shed light on this statistic?

I've been researching this for most of today; having quoted the
Riodades figure from time to time over many years I now have
to say that I have been guilty of quoting this figure without having
done any basic research. Observed as 50.5°C by the way ....
presumably converted to 123°F for the American market, and
then converted back to 50.6°C.

I came across it in the 1970s in the massive multi-volume
"World Survey of Climatology" under the Chief Editorship of
H.E.Landsberg, of which Volume 5, "Climates of Northern
and Western Europe" was edited by another huge name
in 20C climatology, C.C.Wallén. (Gordon Manley wrote
the chapter on the British Isles). That's my excuse ... such big
names, why should I question anything in it? Well, I might
have thought that when I was in my early-20s; my philosophy
is now: Question Everything.

The chapter titled "The Climate of the Iberian Peninsula" is
by the notable Spanish climatologist A.Linés Escardó, and
all he says on this subject is this:

"The highest temperatures in the peninsula (50.5°C) have
been recorded at Riodades (Alto Douro, Portugal)." No
information about date, observer, instruments, or anything
else.

What I've come up with today is that Riodades is a small
commune of some 600 inhabitants in the hill country
(c.700m above sea level) just south of the River Douro,
roughly half way between Oporto and the Spanish border.
There is no observatory, military activity, agricultural
college, or anything that would suggest this might be the
location of a climatological station. It is conceivable that
it may be the wrong location, and the alleged record
temperature has sometimes been attributed to "Los
Riodades", but the only Google hits on that bring up
the temperature record. The village of Riodades has never,
as far as I can discover, been called Los Riodades.

The temperature was recorded on 4th August 1881 -
a summer of widespread extreme temperatures over
both Europe (including the British Isles) and North
America. Stevenson screens were in short supply even
in the UK, and the major observatories at Madrid
and Lisbon sheltered their thermometers on Glaisher
stands, so that is probably the very best exposure that
the Riodades thermometer had (probably it was worse).

I haven't found any reference in Symons's Met Mag or
the Quarterly Journal of the RMS between 1881 and 1883
to this particular observation. To me, it seems
insupportably high, and probably belongs in the trash
can along with Faversham and El Aziziya.

To answer the OP's question, and with the proviso that
I haven't researched it, it seems that the prime candidate
for the European record holder is Catenanuova, on Sicily,
(about 30km SW of Etna!) recorded on 10th August 1999.
It was certainly a very hot day on Sicily with 42°C at both
Catania and Palermo.

If we have any Portuguese readers here, a spot of
research on the observer and instruments at Riodades
in 1881 would be extremely welcome.

Philip

The most comprehensive work I know of on global extremes, Krause and
Flood's 'Weather and Climate Extremes' (1997), quotes the European
record as being 50 C at Seville on 4 August 1881. Unfortunately it
doesn't give any background on the observation (whereas some of the
other continental records they document have quite extensive
discussion about the instruments, situation etc.). I have a fair bit
of scepticism about this observation, especially about the instrument
exposure, but 50.0 at sea level doesn't seem as outlandish as 50.5 at
700 metres elevation.

WMO's Commission for Climatology has appointed a Rapporteur on Climate
Records (not sure if I've got the title right), Randy Cerveny, who is
co-ordinating a re-examination of a lot of these records - not sure
when he's expecting to report.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who doesn't believe El Azizia...

My experience dealing with 19th century Australian data is that all
the (numerous) obs above 50 C turned out to be spurious on further
examination (although actually getting this conclusion into the record
books has been an interesting exercise - I've made enemies amongst
various small-town politicians in the process) - and all of them had
problems more significant than merely that of being measured in a
Glaisher stand - so I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was
happening in southern Europe.

Blair