As Adam Nagourney reports in The Times, Death Valley is experiencing a burst of civic pride over reclaiming a world temperature record: a 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch in California.
The World Meteorological Organization announced in September that it was throwing out what had previously been thought to be the global record: a reading of 136.4 degrees recorded in the Libyan settlement of Al Aziziya on Sept. 13, 1922. The revised record made headlines around the world.
Yet the back story is even more interesting. Khalid el-Fadli, a Libyan member of the meteorological team that investigated the record, found the original 1922 temperature reading in a logbook at the Libyan National Meteorological Center, where he works, on Feb. 15, 2011, when a revolution had just broken out in the capital.
Working from the logbook, the international team would eventually discover that the reading was taken by an untrained observer with an instrument that was outmoded even for its time. What is more, the temperature did not jibe with other temperatures measured in the area on Sept. 13, 1922, and it differed markedly from readings taken later at Azizia.
Yet it took it took the team six months to pursue those findings, given that Mr. Fadli got sucked into a war immediately after reporting the discovery of the notebook. ?During the revolution, it was very dangerous to call anyone outside,? he said in a telephone interview from Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And ?international calls were shut down by the government? in any case, he said.
Mr. Fadli recalled: ?From March until July, I would go to my office ? not regularly, not every day. Because there was no fuel, our life was very hard.?
He recalls reading the e-mails flooding in from international colleagues, at first curious in tone and then deeply concerned as weeks passed by. For a full six months he resisted the urge to reply lest he be accused of corresponding with the enemy.
Given the level of government monitoring, any knowledge that he was communicating with an international committee ?would have been a death sentence for him,? said Chris Burt, a member of the international meteorological team.
Then came a television pronouncement by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya?s longtime dictator, that NATO was using climate data relayed from Libyan scientists to plot its aerial attacks on Libyan government forces. The scientists on the meteorological team assumed the worst. ?My fear was that they had found out that el-Fadli was part of this committee,? Mr. Burt said.
But Mr. Fadli remained below the radar, and when the violence tapered off that August, he resumed communications with his distant colleagues, and together,?they were able to move on with their work.
He continues to work at the Libyan National Meteorological Center. ?It?s not completely normal yet,? Mr. Fadli said of his country?s situation. But a semblance of calm has returned, he added.
His international colleagues remain grateful. ?The records he found were really the smoking gun,? Mr. Burt said. ??He?s really ?the guy? in this investigation ? it never could have happened without him.?
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