California’s Death Valley hits daily temperature record as heatwave drags on West Coast

Los Angeles (AP) — More than 50 million people in the U.S. are under heat alerts as the West continues to be ravaged by a brutal heatwave that has broken records and caused the death of a motorcyclist in California’s Death Valley.

In recent days, dozens of locations across the West and Pacific Northwest have set or broken previous heat records, and more than 165 daily high temperature records could be set or broken this week.

Many areas of Northern California recorded temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) on Sunday, while Las Vegas hit a new record high of 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) and Phoenix, Arizona, set a new daily record for lowest temperature: it never dropped below 91 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius).

A high temperature of 129 Degree were recorded on Saturday and Sunday in Death Valley National Park in eastern California, where one visitor died of heat exposure on Saturday and another person was hospitalized, officials said.

The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists who were riding through the Badwater Basin area in scorching hot weather, the park said in a statement.

The identity of the deceased person has not been determined. The other motorcyclist was taken to a Las Vegas hospital for “severe heat illness,” the statement said. The high temperatures prevented rescue helicopters from responding, as aircraft generally cannot fly safely in temperatures above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, officials said.

The other four members of the group were treated on site.

“While it is very exciting to experience potentially world-record temperatures in Death Valley, we advise visitors to choose their activities carefully and avoid spending extended periods of time outside of an air-conditioned vehicle or building during such high temperatures,” said park ranger Mike Reynolds.

Since July 4, temperatures in Death Valley have reached or exceeded 135 degrees Fahrenheit every day, and that streak is expected to continue through Saturday.

Officials warned that heat illnesses and injuries are cumulative and can build up over the course of one or more days.

“In addition to not being able to cool down while riding due to the high ambient temperatures, experiencing Death Valley by motorcycle in this heat is another challenge as heavy safety equipment must be worn to reduce injuries in the event of an accident,” the park said in a statement.

The high temperatures didn’t faze Chris Kinsel, a visitor to Death Valley. He said it was “like Christmas for me” to be there on a record-breaking day. Kinsel said he and his wife usually come to the park in the winter when it’s still warm enough – but that’s nothing compared to being in one of the hottest places on Earth in July.

“Death Valley in the summer has always been on my bucket list. I’ve always wanted to come here in the summer,” said Kinsel, who was visiting the Badwater Basin area of ​​Death Valley from Las Vegas.

Kinsel said he planned to go to the park’s visitor center to have his photo taken next to the digital display of the current temperature.

Across the Nevada desert, Natasha Ivory took four of her eight children to a water park in Mount Charleston outside Las Vegas, where the highest temperature of the year was recorded on Sunday at 49 degrees.

“They’re having a blast,” Ivory told CNN affiliate Fox5 Vegas. “I’m getting wet, too. It’s too hot not to do this.”

Indiana resident Mark Kavacinski told Fox5 Vegas that his family almost canceled their vacation to Las Vegas because of the extreme heat.

“We knew it was going to be hot. It’s July, right? Did we know it was going to be this hot? No,” Kavacinski said. “But we decided that heat is heat. We can handle it.”

Jill Workman Anderson was also at Mount Charleston, taking a short hike with her dog and enjoying the view.

“We can look out and see the desert,” she said. “It was also 30 degrees cooler than northwest Las Vegas, where we live.”

Las Vegas saw its highest temperature ever on Sunday, reaching 49 degrees Celsius, prompting the local National Weather Service to post photos of cookies baked in a car and melting crayons.

The city has seen five consecutive days of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and that streak is expected to continue at least through Sunday. That would be the longest period of days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit that Las Vegas has ever seen.

Triple-digit temperatures were common throughout Oregon, and several records were broken – including in Salem, where temperatures reached 103 degrees on Sunday, surpassing the 99-degree mark reached in 1960. Temperatures above 100 degrees were common on the wetter east coast, though there were no extreme heat warnings for Sunday.

“Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, avoid the sun and check on relatives and neighbors,” says a weather warning for the Baltimore area. “Small children and pets should never be left unattended in the car under any circumstances.”

Isolated heat warnings were even extended to higher elevations, for example around Lake Tahoe on the border between California and Nevada. The weather service in Reno, Nevada, warned of “significant heat risks, even in the mountains.”

“How hot is it? Well, highs across Nevada and northeast California won’t drop below 100 degrees until next weekend,” the service posted online. “And unfortunately, there won’t be much relief overnight, either.”

Even more extreme highs are expected in the near future, including possibly 130 degrees around midweek in Furnace Creek, California, in Death Valley. The highest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134 degrees Fahrenheit in July 1913 in Death Valley, although some experts dispute that measurement and say the true record is 130 degrees Fahrenheit measured there in July 2021.

Tracy Housley, a native of Manchester, England, said she decided to drive to Death Valley from her Las Vegas hotel after hearing on the radio that temperatures could reach record highs.

“We just thought, let’s be there,” Housley said Sunday. “Let’s enjoy the experience.”

In Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, there have been at least 13 confirmed heat-related deaths this year, and more than 160 other deaths suspected to be heat-related are still under investigation, according to a recent report.

That does not include the death of a 10-year-old boy last week in Phoenix who, according to police, suffered a “heat-related medical incident” while hiking with his family in South Mountain Park and Preserve.

June was the 12th consecutive month in which the global average temperature was at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in pre-industrial times, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.

June this year was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the average June before industrialization, when humanity began burning large amounts of planet-warming fossil fuels. Over the past 12 months, the world has been on average 1.64 degrees Celsius warmer than in pre-industrial times.

The world also experienced its thirteenth consecutive month of record heat. Last month was the hottest June on record, and all of the months before that were also the hottest months on record. The natural El Niño phenomenon contributed to the record heat, but long-term climate change was the main driver of last year’s temperature rise, previous Copernicus analysis showed.

According to Copernicus, June, which marks the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, was also the fifth month in a row in which sea temperatures broke monthly records.

“This is more than a statistical oddity and it shows a major and persistent change in our climate,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus. “Even if this particular series of extremes eventually ends, we will certainly see new records broken as the climate continues to warm. This is inevitable if we do not stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and oceans.”

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, or preferably 1.5 degrees. Although the Paris target refers to warming over a period of decades, rather than a single month or year, consecutive months of exceeding the 1.5-degree warming limit signal that the world is heading toward exceeding the longer-term threshold, scientists say.

Some of Earth’s ecosystems are expected to reach tipping points from which they will have difficulty or even no recovery once the 1.5-degree limit is exceeded, science shows. Many other ecosystems and species will struggle to adapt to warming of nearly two degrees.

CNN’s Robert Shackelford, Rachel Ramirez and Angela Dewan contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly converted a temperature difference of 1.5 degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit. This has been corrected.