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The desert climate or arid climate (in the Köppen climate classification BWh and BWk) is a dry climate sub-type in which there is a severe excess of evaporation over precipitation. The typically bald, rocky, or sandy surfaces in desert climates are dry and hold little moisture, quickly evaporating the already little rainfall they receive.
Tropical deserts are located in regions between 15 and 30 degrees latitude. The environment is very extreme, and they have the highest average monthly temperature on Earth. Rainfall is sporadic; precipitation may not be observed at all in a few years. In addition to these extreme environmental and climate conditions, most tropical deserts are ...
The Sahara Desert features a hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh).The Sahara Desert is one of the driest and hottest regions of the world, with a mean temperature sometimes over 30 °C (86 °F) and the average high temperatures in summer are over 40 °C (104 °F) for months at a time, and can even soar to 47 °C (117 °F).
The Caribbean coast, eastward from the Gulf of Urabá on the Colombia–Panama border to the Orinoco River delta, on the Atlantic Ocean (about 4,000 km (2,500 mi)), have long dry periods (the extreme is the BWh climate (see below), characterized by very low, unreliable precipitation, present, for instance, in extensive areas in the Guajira, and ...
The McMurdo dry valleys of Antarctica, which lack water (whether rain, ice, or snow) much like a non-polar desert and even have such desert features as hypersaline lakes and intermittent streams that resemble (except for being frozen at their surfaces) hot or cold deserts for extreme aridity and lack of precipitation of any kind. Extreme winds ...
Semiarid deserts experience similar conditions to hot deserts, however, the maximum and minimum temperatures tend to be less extreme, and generally range from 10 to 38 °C. Coastal deserts are cooler than hot and semiarid deserts, with average summer temperatures ranging between 13 and 24 °C.
Its largest, continual expanse is located in Mexico, covering a large portion of the state of Chihuahua, along with portions of Coahuila, north-eastern Durango, the extreme northern part of Zacatecas, and small western portions of Nuevo León. With an area of about 501,896 km 2 (193,783 sq mi), [1] it is the largest hot desert in North America. [2]
The Sonoran Desert is clearly distinct from nearby deserts (e.g., the Great Basin, Mojave, and Chihuahuan deserts) because it provides subtropical warmth in winter and two seasons of rainfall (in contrast, for example, to the Mojave's dry summers and cold winters). This creates an extreme contrast between aridity and moisture. [4]