The world's record heatwaves - Statista

According to NASA, there is “unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate”, Statista reports. Data from Copernicus, the European Earth Observation program for the European Space Agency, shows that July 22, 2024, was the world’s hottest daily global average temperature since the institution’s records began in 1940 (hitting a global average of 17.16 °C/62.76 °F).

At a regional scale too, absolute temperature records are being broken around the globe. Just in the years 2022-2025, 41 countries broke or tied their all-time national heat records, some of them more than once. Japan saw its hottest day on record last August, reaching 41.8°C/107.2°F in Isesaki, in the Gunma Prefecture. Eight other countries tied or beat their heat records last year, including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Paraguay. Some records were also set in Southeast Asia in 2024, when an exceptional heatwave hit the region. Cambodia set a new record at 42.8 °C/109.0 °F, while Laos hit a new all-time high of 43.7 °C/110.7 °F.

Meanwhile, Australia and Uruguay matched their national records in 2022, with 50.7 °C/123.3 °F in Onslow and 44.0°C/111.2 °F in Florida, respectively, as the United Kingdom saw the mercury break an all-time high in July 2022 as it passed the 40°C barrier.

Previously, during the summer of 2021 - one of the hottest on Earth -, Canada, Spain and Italy recorded peak temperatures. The Italian record, 48.8 °C/119.8 °F at Syracuse, was reported to be the highest temperature ever measured in Europe, which was certified by the WMO in 2024.

In Antarctica, a new record was hit in 2020 at the Esperanza base during the austral summer when temperatures rose to over 18 °C/64.9 °F. One year earlier, the French national record of 46 °C/114.8 °F was measured at Vérargues (Hérault), while the 2019 heatwave also saw other records broken in Europe, such as in Belgium and Germany.

According to the WMO, the world record is still officially attributed to Furnace Creek, in California’s Death Valley National Park, with 56.7 °C/134 °F reached in 1913.

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Heat records have become commonplace in meteorological record-keeping, while new cold records have become few and far between. According to data from the National Centers for Environmental Information at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 7 percent of the Earth's surface experienced new mean monthly temperature records this April, meaning that the average temperature was the highest for the respective time and location ever recorded.

Mean monthly temperature records reached highs in the past three years in May of 2024, when around 15 percent of the Earth's surface set new mean temperature records for that month, and July of 2024, when this applied to almost 14 percent of the globe. The biggest month for cold records in the same time frame was January 2024. However, a much smaller 0.9 percent of Earth's surface set new records for the lowest mean monthly temperatures ever recorded.

Looking back further, new heat records used to be far less common than new cold records in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, with the balance flipping for almost all months in the past decades. In April, the most recent month on record, new cold record were much more common, before new heat records became the norm by a large margin from the 2000s onwards.

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