A reading of 135.8 degrees below zero was measured in Antarctica, using remote sensing from satellites.


There's cold, and then there's Antarctica cold. ... How does a frosty reading of 135.8 degrees below zero sound?






Winter in Antarctica occurs, as it does throughout the Southern Hemisphere, in the months of June, July and August, when the continent is in total darkness.

The official record, as measured by a thermometer, remains -128.6 degrees, set in Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the official keepers of world weather records, recognizes only readings measured by thermometers on location, not remotely by satellite.

"Vostok is still the world's coldest recorded location," said Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University professor of geography and the "rapporteur for climate extremes" at the WMO, via e-mail. "They are using remote sensing, not standard weather stations, so we at the World Meteorological Organization will not recognize that."

Cerveny noted that there is no way to determine the elevation of the remote-sensed value. Official temperature measurements must be made of the air about 7 feet above the ground, to prevent the ground temperature from impacting the air temperature.

Vostok is a Russian research station about 600 miles from the South Pole, where the highest temperature ever recorded was 4 degrees on a summer afternoon.

As for the USA's coldest mark on record, it's -80 degrees, set in Prospect Creek, Alaska, on Jan. 23, 1971, according to Christopher Burt, weather historian for the Weather Underground. Excluding Alaska, the lowest temperature was the -70-degree temperature recorded in Rogers Pass, Mont., in January 1954.

Regardless of whether or not the Antarctica mark is an "official" record, it's still unimaginably cold: "Thank God, I don't know how exactly it feels," Scambos said. He said scientists do routinely make naked 100-degree-below-zero dashes outside at the South Pole, so people can survive that temperature for about three minutes.

Scambos said that in East Antarctica, the air is dry, the ground chilly and the skies cloudless. Cold air swoops down off a dome and gets trapped in a chilly lower spot, "hugging the surface and sliding around."

The Antarctica measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board NASA's Aqua satellite and by Landsat 8, a satellite launched early this year by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.




Contributing: Associated Press

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