Australia registers record high winter temperature

Australia registered a record-high winter temperature Monday, with the mercury hitting 41.6 degrees Celsius (106.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in a part of the country's rugged and remote northwest coast.

The Bureau of Meteorology said it logged the scorching reading from a military training facility at Yampi Sound at 3:37 pm local time -- apparently smashing the previous record by 0.4 degrees Celsius.

A Bureau of Meteorology spokesperson told AFP that the reading was "the hottest August temperature for any location in Australia" and "the new Australia-wide maximum temperature record for any winter month."

While the record is "provisionally confirmed", scientists still have to make sure the recording was not the result of some local anomaly or instrument failure before it officially enters the record books.

The previous record of 41.2 degrees Celsius was set in August 2020 at nearby West Roebuck.

The antipodean winter runs from the beginning of June until the end of August.

Climate scientists have already predicted that 2024 will be the hottest year for the Earth on record.

From January to July, global temperatures were 0.7 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

In recent decades, as human-caused carbon emissions have risen, temperature records have tumbled worldwide.

In the last few weeks alone record temperatures have been recorded in the Mediterranean Sea, Norway's Arctic Svalbard archipelago and the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.