Nawabshah, in Sindh, registered a sweltering 50.2 degree Celsius on April 30
Picture for representational purpose only Credit: Agnimirh Basu A city in southern Pakistan’s Sindh province may have broken all records on Monday, April 30, when it recorded a temperature of 50.2 degree Celsius.
In his tweet, Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist at Paris-based meteorological service, Meteo France, noted that the temperature for Nawabshah, that has a population of 1.1 million and is about 193 km miles from the Arabian Sea, was the warmest April temperature ever recorded in Pakistan and for the entire Asian continent.
In an email to The Washington Post, Christopher Burt, another weather expert, said it probably was also the highest temperature “yet reliably observed on Earth in modern records.” The competing hottest April temperature of 51.0 C set in Santa Rosa, Mexico, in April 2001, is “of dubious reliability,” Burt said.
Nawabshah had also observed a very hot March. In late March, a heat wave pushed the temperature there to a national record of 45.5 C for the month. Reporting on Nawabshah’s experience on Monday, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper described the heat around the city as “unbearable” and said heatstroke “caused dozens of people to faint.” Another media outlet, Pakistan Today reported that the demand for electricity had exceeded generation resulting in “unannounced outages” that exacerbated the heat’s effects due to a lack of air conditioning.
The Post noted that other parts of Asia had also registered record April temperatures. For instance, the village of Poltavka in Russia, near the border with Kazakhstan, recorded a temperature of 34.7 C on April 29. It is the warmest April temperature ever measured in the Asian part of Russia.
Weather experts say April’s heat wave has resulted from a sprawling heat dome centered over the northern Indian Ocean.
Rajasthan, bordering Sindh, is also seeing a heat wave. On May 2, Bundi in eastern Rajasthan remained hottest with a maximum temperature of 47 C. Bundi was followed by Jaisalmer (46.5 C), Churu (46.4 C), Bikaner (46.2 C), Kota (45.6 C), Barmer (45.4 C), Sriganganagar (45 C), Ajmer (43.4 C), Jodhpur (43.1 C), Udaipur (42.3 C) and Pilani (41.2 C).
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