Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
Uh… if you can get liquid water hotter than 100°C without adding other substances or pressure you should go claim your Nobel prize or wizard robe.
Today we casually say “100 °C at 1 atm,” but in Fahrenheit’s time, controlling or even measuring atmospheric pressure was hard. Boiling water on different days could still get different temperatures because the air pressure was different that day or at that location. They also only had alcohol-based thermometers, maybe some early mercury ones… it wasn’t easy to measure reliably.
Boiling point drops ~0.5 °C per 150 meters of elevation, or something to that effect. It was unreliable for big science when the goal is lab-friendly anchor points.