We had 48C where I am in Spain and that was ‘the highest on record’; I browsed back 8 years or so in Facebook and found my and my friends pics of thermometers pointing over 50C in the same place. You have make headlines somehow right?
What's inportant is not the absolute value but the differences over the year when measured in the exact same condition with the same device for which error margins are known. It also just depends where this thermometer was. If it had been sitting in plain sun all day long and wasn't specially built for that it will always be at quite higher temperature the same way any surface can reach really high temperature.
In the shade. No-one hangs thermometers in the sun here. But yeah; a house grade thermometer is not that accurate I guess. Thing is; when the heatwave (and hurricane after it) was at that time, it was so hot that people (and dogs) were vomiting (including me) because it was so hot (I am not from here and definitely not used to this kind of weather; I had the same problem when I was in India during a heatwave). This year nothing came close; neither on my imperfect thermometer nor the physical struggles.
