ʽAziziya

For other uses, see Aziziye (disambiguation).

‘Aziziya العزيزية
Country	Libya
Region	Tripolitania
District	Jafara
Elevation	390 ft (119 m)
Population  (2006)
• Total	23,399
Time zone	UTC + 2

‘Aziziya (Anglicized: /əˈziːziːə/; Arabic: العزيزية al-ʿAzīziyyah / al-ʻAzīzīyah / al-ʿazīzīya), sometimes spelled El Azizia, is a small town and it was the capital of the Jafara district in northwestern Libya, 41 kilometres (25 mi) southwest of the capital Tripoli. Before 2001 it was in the ‘Aziziya District and its capital. ‘Aziziya is a major trade centre of the Sahel Jeffare plateau, being on a trade route from the coast to the Nafusa Mountains and the Fezzan region to the south . As of 2006, the town's population has been estimated at over 23,399.

Geography and climate

On 13 September 1922, a high temperature of 57.8 °C (136 °F) was recorded in ‘Aziziya. This was long considered the highest temperature ever measured on Earth.

Dasht-e Lut, Iran is the hottest place on Earth. Iran's Lut Desert, an area so parched and desolate that no one is around to regularly monitor temperatures. (What a dreadful job that would be.) Though maintaining a weather station is impractical in the Lut, a NASA satellite equipped with a moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) was able to measure temperatures here from space, during a seven-year study. In five of those years — 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009 — the hottest spot on Earth could be found in the Lut. In 2005, a temperature of 159.3 degrees Fahrenheit was measured, the highest reading ever officially confirmed for a location on Earth.

However, that reading was controversial:

1. The weather station was first in 'Aziziya town, but in 1919 it was moved to a hilltop fort, where the weather station was set up on black tarmac, which would have absorbed more sunlight and made the air there artificially hotter, explaining a period of very hot readings there from 1919 to 1928.
2. Shortly before the record reading on 13 September 1922, the weather station's usual maximum thermometer had been damaged, and replaced by an uncalibrated ordinary maximum-minimum thermometer such as often used in greenhouses.
3. On 11 September 1922, the usual record keeper was replaced by an inexperienced observer, who was untrained in the use of the thermometer and the record log. This is known by the change in handwriting on the log sheets, and by the high and low temperatures being recorded in the wrong columns. The thermometer used sliding colored cylinders to record maximum and minimum temperatures, and these cylinders were about 7 to 8 degrees celsius long on the thermometer scale. The WMO now believes that the inexperienced observer was reading from the wrong end of the high-temperature cylinder inside the thermometer, getting a reading which was 7 to 8 degrees too high.

On 13 September 2012, the World Meteorological Organization announced that the WMO Commission of Climatology World Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes had found the record invalid. Its world record for hottest temperature is now 56.7 °C (134 °F) recorded on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California in the United States.