Highest Temperatures Recorded on Each Continent
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Highest Temperatures Recorded on Each ContinentNorth America holds the global heat record at 56.7C, measured at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, in 1913, a figure so extreme it is still occasionally questioned. Africa follows closely at 55.0C (Kebili, Tunisia), and Asia at 53.7C (Ahvaz, Iran). Remarkably, five continents, North America, Africa, Asia, Oceania and even South America and Europe, have all exceeded 48C, showing how widespread extreme heat can be across very different climates. The clear outlier is Antarctica at 19.8C: still above freezing, recorded at Signy Island, but roughly 37 degrees cooler than the world record. The tight clustering of the six warm continents between 48.8 and 56.7C, against Antarctica's lone cool figure, neatly captures the planet's temperature divide between the tropics and the poles.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- WMO / List of weather records
- Coverage
- 7 entities · 7 observations
- Measure
- Record High Temperature (Celsius)
- Last updated
- 7 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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