Stunning images from the Sahara Desert show vast lakes carved into rippling sand dunes after one of the world’s most arid and barren places was hit by its first floods in decades.
The Sahara does have rain, but usually only a few inches a year and rarely in late summer. For two days in September, however, intense rain fell in parts of the desert in southeastern Morocco after a low pressure system advanced across the northwestern Sahara.
Preliminary NASA satellite data recorded nearly 200 mm of rain in some parts of the region.
Errachidia, a desert city in southeastern Morocco, recorded almost 76 mm of rain, most of it in just two days last month. This is more than four times the normal precipitation for the entire month of September, and amounts to more than half a year’s amount for this region.
“It’s been 30 to 50 years since it rained so much in such a short space of time,” Houssine Youabeb of Morocco’s meteorological agency told the AP news agency last week.
As the rain fell over the desert, it created a new waterscape amidst the palm trees and shrubby flora.
Some of the most dramatic images are from the desert city of Merzouga, where the rare deluge carved new lakes into the sand dunes.
The reflections of the city’s palm trees now shine in the expanse of a new lagoon, framed by steep sand dunes.
The rain also filled lakes that are normally dry, such as one in Iriqui National Park, Morocco’s largest national park.
While much of the rain fell in sparsely populated remote areas, some of it fell in Morocco’s cities and towns, causing deadly floods last month that killed more than a dozen people.
The Sahara is the largest non-polar desert in the world, extending over 9.3 million km². Satellite images from September showed large swaths of it covered in green as storms moved further north than normal, a phenomenon that some studies have linked to human-caused climate change.
According to recent research, more extreme rainfall events can be expected in the Sahara in the future as fossil fuel pollution continues to warm the planet and disrupt the water cycle.
This content was originally published in Rare photos show floods in the largest hot desert on Earth, the Sahara on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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