Weather and Climate

Extreme Weather

Although weather experts rely on average temperatures over a longer period of time to predict the weather, there are often extreme weather conditions.

The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was at Vostok, a station in Antarctica. –89° C was measured in 1983 . The highest temperature was recorded in the Libyan desert in 1922 (57°C). The highest annual rainfall was measured in Cherrapunji, India , at the foot of the Himalayan mountain range. 26 metres of rain fell over a one year period.

Sign in Cherrapunji - the wettest place on the planet
Image: No machine-readable author provided. RMehra~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims).,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Vostok station - Antarctica
Image: Todd Sowers, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Columbia University, Palisades, New York for NOAA,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons