The global embedding of a black hole spacetime into a higher dimensional flat spacetime is used to define a local temperature for observers in free fall outside a static black hole. The local free-fall temperature remains finite at the event horizon and in asymptotically flat spacetime it approaches the Hawking temperature at spatial infinity. Freely falling observers outside an AdS black hole do not see any high-temperature thermal radiation even if the Hawking temperature of such black holes can be arbitrarily high.
