The places with the most extreme temperature ranges on Earth are Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon in Yakutia, Siberia, where recorded extremes run from about −67.8 °C in winter to 38 °C in summer, a spread of more than 100 °C.
Verkhoyansk recorded −67.8 °C in February 1892 and Oymyakon about −67.7 °C in February 1933, the lowest reliably measured temperatures at permanently inhabited places. On 20 June 2020 Verkhoyansk reached 38.0 °C, which the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) later verified as the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle. The gap between those two readings, roughly 105 °C, is the widest documented at any single town. Measured by the difference between the coldest and warmest monthly averages, Yakutia also leads, with swings of around 60 °C. Next come other deep continental interiors: Yakutsk, northern Mongolia, the Kazakh steppe and the Canadian and American interior. For the sharpest swings within a single day, however, the leaders are high deserts and the northern Great Plains.
Continentality: Why Land Far From the Sea Swings Hardest
The single biggest control on a place's temperature range is its distance from the ocean, a property climatologists call continentality. Water has a specific heat capacity roughly four to five times that of dry rock and soil, so it takes far more energy to warm or cool it by one degree. The ocean also mixes heat downward through tens of metres, while land heats and cools only in a thin surface layer. The sea therefore acts as a thermal flywheel: coastal places receive air that has passed over water barely a few degrees warmer in summer than in winter.
Deep inside a continent there is no such buffer. Land surfaces gain heat quickly under summer sun and lose it quickly in winter darkness, and the air above them follows. Early twentieth-century climatologists turned this into numbers; the continentality index proposed by Władysław Gorczyński in 1920 combines annual range with latitude, and on almost any version of such indices eastern Siberia scores as the most continental climate on Earth. The mechanics are explained further in our guide to the continental climate.
Prevailing winds matter too. In the mid-latitudes the westerlies carry mild Atlantic air deep into Europe, which is why Moscow's winters are cold but not Siberian. By the time air reaches the Lena basin it has crossed more than 5,000 km of land, and the Pacific to the east lies behind mountain ranges and against the prevailing flow.
Polar Night, the Siberian High and Cold-Air Basins
Continentality sets the stage; latitude and topography push Yakutia to the limit. Verkhoyansk sits at about 67.5° N, just north of the Arctic Circle, so for several weeks around the December solstice the sun barely clears the horizon. With almost no incoming sunlight, the ground radiates heat to space continuously. In June the situation reverses: nearly 24 hours of daylight let the land warm without a night to cool it.
From autumn to spring a vast dome of cold, dense air, the Siberian High, settles over the region. It is the strongest semi-permanent high-pressure system on the planet, and the WMO-recognised record for highest sea-level air pressure, 1,083.8 hPa, was set at Agata in Krasnoyarsk Krai on 31 December 1968. High pressure means sinking air, clear skies and calm winds, the ideal conditions for radiative cooling. The air is also extremely dry; with little water vapour to absorb outgoing infrared radiation, heat escapes easily.
Local terrain adds the final push. Both Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon lie in valleys ringed by mountains, the Verkhoyansk Range and the Chersky Range. On still winter nights the chilled, heavy air drains downslope and pools in the valley floors, forming temperature inversions in which the hillsides can be noticeably warmer than the towns below.
Places Ranked by Their Annual Swing
Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon, Yakutia
Verkhoyansk, a town of roughly 1,000 people on the Yana River, has a January mean of about −45 °C and a July mean around +16 °C. Oymyakon, a village at around 750 metres elevation, has similar winter averages and has recorded summer highs in the low-to-mid 30s. Both claim the title of Northern Hemisphere's "Pole of Cold". An unofficial −71.2 °C once attributed to Oymyakon for 1926 is not accepted by meteorologists, and since 2020 the WMO has recognised a lower Northern Hemisphere reading of −69.6 °C at Klinck on the Greenland ice sheet in 1991, an uninhabited automatic station. Our list of the coldest temperatures ever recorded sets these against Antarctica.
Yakutsk
Yakutsk, on the Lena River with a population of about 350,000, is the largest city built on continuous permafrost and the coldest major city on Earth. Its January mean sits around −38 to −40 °C, while its July mean is roughly +19 °C, and summer afternoons above 30 °C are not unusual. That gives an annual range of monthly means close to 60 °C in a city with apartment blocks, universities and an airport.
Northern Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar
Ulaanbaatar, at roughly 1,350 metres, is the coldest national capital by annual mean temperature. January averages around −21 °C and July about +18 °C, a spread near 40 °C, with record extremes spanning from below −40 °C to the mid-30s. Northern Mongolian towns along the Siberian border swing further still.
The Kazakh Steppe
Astana, Kazakhstan's capital, has January means near −14 °C and July means around +21 °C, and has recorded extremes of roughly −52 °C and over +40 °C. The open steppe offers no shelter from Siberian air in winter or from Central Asian heat in summer.
The Canadian Interior
Snag, Yukon, recorded −63.0 °C on 3 February 1947, the lowest temperature measured in continental North America. Fort Vermilion in northern Alberta has recorded about −61 °C (January 1911) and summer highs in the upper 30s, giving it one of the widest recorded ranges in the Western Hemisphere.
The Great Plains and the Fastest Swings on Record
Siberia owns the widest annual ranges, but the northern Great Plains of the United States hold the records for speed. The cause is the collision of air masses: bitterly cold Arctic air sliding south along the Rockies meets warm air, and chinook winds descending the eastern slopes of the mountains warm by compression as they fall.
- Loma, Montana: on 14–15 January 1972 the temperature rose from −48 °F to 49 °F, a 103 °F (about 57 °C) jump in 24 hours, the largest 24-hour change officially recognised in the United States.
- Spearfish, South Dakota: on the morning of 22 January 1943 a chinook lifted the temperature from −4 °F to 45 °F, about 27 °C, in roughly two minutes, a figure widely cited as the fastest rise on record.
- Browning, Montana: on 23–24 January 1916 the temperature fell about 100 °F (around 56 °C), from 44 °F to −56 °F, within a day as an Arctic front passed.
These are weather events rather than climate averages, yet they come from the same geography: an interior plain with nothing to moderate the air that arrives.
Deserts and the Day–Night Swing
A second kind of extreme range happens within 24 hours. The diurnal range, the gap between afternoon high and pre-dawn low, is greatest where the air is dry and the sky is clear. Humid air holds heat overnight like a blanket; desert air lets it radiate straight to space.
The high deserts are the most extreme. On the Altiplano of Bolivia and northern Chile, and around the Atacama, altitude thins the atmosphere as well as drying it. Towns such as San Pedro de Atacama, at roughly 2,400 metres, can see afternoons in the mid-20s °C followed by nights near or below freezing, and high Altiplano stations regularly record daily swings of 25–30 °C. More detail is in our Atacama Desert guide.
In the Sahara, daily ranges of 20 °C or more are typical, and in winter, clear nights in the central massifs of Algeria and Niger can drop below freezing after days in the 20s. Satellites have measured desert ground-surface temperatures around 70 °C in Iran's Lut Desert, far hotter than the air above it, and the ground loses that heat rapidly after sunset.
Death Valley shows the limits. It holds the WMO-listed world air-temperature record of 56.7 °C from July 1913, a reading some climatologists dispute, and its July afternoons routinely pass 45 °C. Yet its diurnal range, typically around 15 °C, is smaller than the Altiplano's, because the floor lies below sea level in a deep basin where hot air lingers, and summer nights often stay above 30 °C.
Annual Versus Daily Range: Yakutsk, Reykjavík and Singapore
Annual range and diurnal range reward different geography. Annual range is driven by latitude and continentality: the bigger the seasonal difference in sunlight and the farther from the sea, the bigger the swing. Diurnal range is driven by humidity, cloud and altitude. Yakutsk has a large annual range but, under winter fog and inversions, modest daily swings in January; the Altiplano has huge daily swings but a small annual range, because at 16–22° S the sun is high in every month.
The effect of the sea is clearest when places at similar latitudes are set side by side. Reykjavík lies at 64° N, slightly north of Yakutsk at 62° N. Yet Reykjavík's January mean is around 0 °C and its July mean about 11 °C, a range of roughly 11–12 °C against Yakutsk's 60. The difference is the North Atlantic Current and the maritime air it feeds onto Iceland year-round.
At the other end of the scale sits Singapore. Close to the equator and surrounded by warm sea, it has monthly means that stay within about 2 °C of each other, around 26.5–28.5 °C, and its all-time extremes span only roughly 19 °C to 37 °C. Even Antarctica's interior, far colder than Siberia, has a smaller annual range, because it never gets a warm summer: Vostok's record −89.2 °C came in July 1983, but even its warmest summer days rarely climb much above about −15 °C. A 100-degree spread needs both a brutal winter and a real summer, and only the continental interiors deliver both, as our overview of the climate of Russia shows across its eleven time zones.