Highest Temperatures Recorded on Each Continent

About This Dataset

This chart shows the highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on each of the seven continents, in degrees Celsius. North America holds the world record, set in Death Valley more than a century ago.

✨ AI Insight

North 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.

Source: WMO / List of weather records

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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North America leads with 57 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 48 · median: 51.

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Gap in All Time: North America is 2.9× larger than Antarctica.