You don't want to know what the purple on this map means!

Australia’s weather is so hot, new colors added to weather map

By Claudine Zap | The Lookout – Tue, Jan 8, 2013


Australia weather map adds new colors for record breaking heat (Image via Bureau of Meteorology)
The forecast in Australia: Hot, hot, hot—and getting hotter.

As a record-breaking heatwave
hovers over many regions and territories (which are in their summer
months now), the continent’s Bureau of Meteorology has added two new colors to the weather map to reflect the rising mercury.

The map currently shows the
weather in orange tones at the top, which indicate temperatures 40 to 48
degrees Celsius. But forecasts are predicting off-the-charts weather.
As a result, pink and purple will now cover temperatures over 50 degrees
Celsius—should it climb that high.

For those rusty on the temperature conversion, that is a
sweat-inducing 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The forecast coming from the bureau's model is showing temperatures
in excess of 50 degrees celsius," said David Jones, head of the bureau's climate monitoring and prediction unit.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a "dome of heat" over
Australia is contributing to the record-breaking weather, which has
gone on for six straight days with average maximum temps above 39
degrees Celsius (102 Fahrenheit). The trend seems likely to continue.

Adding to the misery, the searing heat is also fueling wildfires that continue to rage in southeastern Australia.

"You don't get conditions worse than this," Shane Fitzsimmons, New
South Wales Rural Fire Service commissioner, told the Associated Press.

Australia isn’t the only place battling record high temperatures. Last year, the United States had its warmest year on record.