This Is the Hottest Inhabited Place on Earth

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 17, 7:30AM EST

This Is the Hottest Inhabited Place on Earth — © yoh4nn / Getty Images

The world is getting hotter, and drier in some places. It is still very cold in others. Recently, the temperature in Death Valley, sometimes known as the hottest place on earth, reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Parts of Antarctica routinely have temperatures 50 degrees below zero. In other parts of the world, floods kill hundreds of people. In some places, it barely rains, even over the course of a decade.

What makes a place uninhabitable? No food. No relief from deadly heat. Cold that can damage the skin in minutes. We set out to find the answer. While any answer has to be somewhat subjective, there are areas of the world so hostile to humans that people can just barely live in them at all. We looked at one where temperatures can be fatal.

Using data from the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), 24/7 Wall St. has identified the hottest inhabited place on earth. Places we examine were ranked based on the average year-round temperature. Only places that are currently inhabited were included.

The cities we looked at to find the hottest span the Middle East, Africa and South America. Several of these areas have had at least one month in the past 10 years where the average temperature was above 100 degrees.
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To determine the hottest inhabited place on Earth, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed average temperature data from the GHCN (Version 4) of the National Centers for Environmental Information of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Weather stations were ranked based on the average year-round temperature from 2011 to 2020. Only places with at least five years of data were considered. Data used to determine the hottest month also came from the GHCN and are for the years 2011 to 2020.

The hottest inhabited place on earth is Abéché, Chad. Here are the details:

Average year-round temperature: 90.0° F
Hottest average month: May (99.3° F average)
Hottest month in past decade: May 2020 (100.7° F average)
Elevation at nearest weather station: 1,801 feet

Click here to see all the hottest inhabited places on earth.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.