The present study focuses on understanding the effect of load and temperature on Acoustic Emission (AE) signal propagation in an Aluminium 2024-T3 panel. In addition, the ability of an AE system to locate damage under these operational and environmental conditions was evaluated. The work was performed in two stages. In stage one, the wave group velocities of guided Lamb waves were measured for a range of temperatures from -40 ̊,C to +70 ̊,C. At each temperature level, six different static loads were applied that ranged from 0 MPa to 250 MPa in increments of 50 MPa. It was observed that the variation of temperature and load altered the wave group velocities, which were verified with analytical solutions found in the literature. In stage two, a representative AE signal, simulating a fracture phenomenon was emitted from a randomly selected point. Using values of wave velocity measured in stage one, the location of the representative AE signal under these conditions was calculated and errors were determined. It was found that the location algorithm was not sensitive to wave group velocities changes due to temperature and loads, thus providing an accurate location of the source within 1cm for 93% of the cases studied.