EXTREME CLIMATES

Coldest Place....

Yes, the Antarctic has the coldest temperatures on the earth, but that shouldn't surprise you. (Coldest reported temperature ever was -89.4°C/-129°F.) What most people don't know is that the South Pole has the clearest, calmest weather anywhere on earth. Most of the wickedly high winds that everyone associates with the cold and the ice of the Antarctic are around the edges of the continent at the shores. These winds are so fast and so fierce they are world-famous and they have a special name, too - katabatic winds - and they can blow with hurricane force up to 304kmh/190 mph!

Believe it or not with all the ice in the Antarctic, there is very little actual snowfall or precipitation. It does snow on the ice during the austral winter, but measured on an annual basis the Antarctic is as dry as the Sahara Desert.

You want to talk about world records, Antarctica is the land of extremes. It is the coldest, windiest, and highest continent anywhere on earth. With an average elevation about 7,544ft/2,300 meters above sea level it is the highest continent. Even though it is covered in ice it receives some of the least amount of rainfall, getting just slightly more rainfall than the Sahara Desert, making it the largest desert on earth. Most people have the misconception that a desert is a hot, dry, sandy, lifeless place, but the true definition of a desert is any geographical location that receives very, very little rainfall. Even though there's ice on the ground in Antarctica, that ice has been there for a very long time.

Antarctica is the only continent that has never had an indigenous population of humans because it has always been such an extreme environment. Just the boat ride getting to the continent is over the most treacherous seas anywhere in the world. The inaccessibility of the place and the lack of reliable food and means for constructing shelter has kept humans away for thousands of years. But the new technologies developed over the last 200 years made it possible for people to reach these icy shores to explore and study the Antarctic for the first time in human history.

Hottest Temperature....
EL AZIZIA, LIBYA

There are many places on earth that are plenty hot - record-breaking hot. In fact, there's a good chance on the day this record-breaking temperature was recorded by a meteorological station in El Azizia in 1922 there were other places hundreds of miles away that were even hotter. In all likelihood, this record temperature has been exceeded since then in many places on earth, but we have no official records of the temperatures. It is important to note that when atmospheric temperatures are recorded it is not the surface temperature, where it can sometimes reach 150° F/ 66° C, but rather the air temperature at about 5 feet (1.6 m) above the surface in an enclosed shelter. Of course, it's important that the temperature sensor is not exposed to direct sunlight - the shelter is louvered to permit air flow across the sensor. Most humans don't 'hang out' where some of the hottest tempertatures on earth are regularly experienced so there aren't a lot of meterological stations in these places to reliably record extreme temperatures.
THE WETTEST PLACE.....
Mount Wai-‘ale-‘ale, Kauai, one of the Hawaiian islands - the weather station here is 1569 metres high and records on average 13,000mm to 11,684mm rain per year, depending on which source you believe. Either way this is really wet!!!!! Rain falls on between 335 and 360 days per year, again depending on which source you believe. Nearby sea level sites, meanwhile, record around 500mm rain per year.

As you can see, sources vary considerably as to how much rain falls here. Bodin (1978) quotes 11,684mm per year figure as being the 1912-45 average, an average that quite possibly will have changed since then, whilst The National Climatic Data Center quotes this figure as a 30 year average there, but fails to mention which 30 period was covered. The Weather Network and The Guiness Book of Weather Records (Holford 1977) quotes 11,455mm rain per year, whilst Ahrens (2000) quotes 11,680mm as the average annual rainfall at Mount Wai-'ale-'ale and Kroll (1995) claims 13,000mm falls there.

Similarly, The Weather Network and the Guiness Book of Weather Records quote 335 days with rain here whilst Simons (1996) suggests that rain falls on an incredible 360 days per year here. Nice.