A severe heatwave is ongoing in Europe. Temperature records broken in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
On 11 July 2023, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in some areas of Extremadura (Spain) exceeded 60°C, as highlighted in this data visualisation derived from measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) instrument. The ongoing heatwave in Spain this week is resulting in a total of 13 autonomous communities, being at extreme risk (red alert), significant risk (orange alert), and risk (yellow alert) due to maximum temperatures that, in some cases, will exceed 40°C and reach a maximum of 43°C.
For reference, “in areas where vegetation is dense, the land surface temperature never rises above 35°C. The hottest land surface temperatures on Earth are in plant-free desert landscapes.”
Ah, I see you’re one of these people that will dismiss such claim because of “surface temperature”. Well, as someone that:
I can tell you that surface temperature, even if they make “bigger numbers”, are extremely relevant to the degradation of the situation, no matter how misleading you think it is. The ground didn’t “suddenly” get hotter with everything else staying the same; and everything getting hotter also have dire consequences. It’s just a metric, it might not be the best one, but people should stop dismissing these, because it’s by having a hot frying pan that the content gets cooked.
Nope, not at all. You completely misunderstood my point.
I’m not saying the ground suddenly got hotter and everything else stayed the same. In this case, it’s just a metric that’s quoted because it has a misleading high value especially by people who are just scrolling through.
It’s click bait.
Here’s an article talking about the types of temperature measurements. If LST is high, odds are air temperature will be high to, and air temp is much more relevant to our life as a human, whether we’re going to die, and easy to compare to how hot it is locally.