"The Concordia research base at Dome C of the Antarctic, which is at an altitude of 3,000 metres (9,800 feet), on Friday registered a record -11.5 degrees Celsius (11.3 Fahrenheit), Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist from France-Meteo tweeted.
Normally, temperatures fall with the end of the southern summer, but the Dumont d'Urville station on Antarctica registered record temperatures for March with 4.9C (40.82F), at a time of year when normally temperatures are already sub-zero."
"Above normal" is of course inflammatory because it's comparing to the mean, not the previous record. But as you can see, primary temperature monitoring sites have recorded extremely high temperatures, sometimes record-breaking, and there is no modeling involved in these results.
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/exceptionally-high-temperatu...
Do you think you can gauge the weather when you are 500 miles away from it?
If that is correct, should all the papers etc have run with the headlines that they did last week? If you were a newspaper editor and knew this was how the information was being derived, would you feel comfortable giving your readers this information?