Death Valley gauge reads 130 degrees on Sunday

California sizzled to a triple-digit temperature so hot that meteorologists need to verify it as a planet-wide high mark.

Death Valley recorded a scorching 130 degrees Sunday, which if the sensors and other conditions check out would be the hottest any spot on Earth has been in more than 89 years and the third-warmest ever measured.

The temperature, measured at the aptly named Furnace Creek during a blistering heat wave, would be the hottest temperature recorded in August, said Arizona State University professor Randy Cerveny, who coordinates the World Meteorological Organization’s extreme temperature team, which is already investigating the mark.

That 130 is only below the disputed all-time record of 134 degrees at nearly the same spot in 1913 and a 131-degree mark in Tunisia in 1931, but both were in July, traditionally the planet’s hottest month.

Mch of the verification effort will be looking at how the measurement was taken and the sensor itself, Cerveny said. Sunday’s temperature would beat marks of 129 recorded three times in recent years, he said.

“We are having more extremes than we had in the past,” Cerveny said.

The world is “creeping up on (the 134-degree record) year after year. That is something that cannot be denied,” he said. “These extremes tell us a lot about what will happen in the future.”

The heat wave is caused by a “massive dome of high pressure” that keeps roasting the West and the normal Southwest monsoon that would provide rain and relief is missing, so there has been no cooling, Cerveny said. Phoenix has gone weeks with temperatures staying above 90, even in the morning, he said.

The 130-mark capped one week of a summer of “very strange” weather, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Weather Service’s Center for Weather and Climate.

On Saturday, a fire tornado formed during a wildfire near Chilcoot, California. And days before that, a violent straight-wind derecho devastated parts of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, killing four people and causing billions of dollars in damages. The Atlantic keeps setting records for earliest hurricanes.