Weatherscapes

Al Anbar Province: The Wild West of Iraq

Empty, barren, and seemingly uninhabitable but for the fertile strip of land surrounding the Euphrates River, Iraq’s Al Anbar Province is a desert where the sand dissolves into the sky in an ethereal, shimmering horizon. Lying under subtropical skies, a belt of descending, high pressure air keeps all but the hardiest storms away, and allows the sun to maintain a constant presence.

But weather is about the release of energy, and to say that the skies above Al Anbar Province could be described in unidimensional terms (hot, and nothing but) would be to overlook the meteorological drama that often descends upon this Middle-Eastern desert. Explosive winds rake the landscape of Al Anbar in all seasons, making it cold to the bone in winter and blustery in the summer. Winter can host large, frontal storms that barge onto the province from the north, inundating the sun-hardened desert with cold rain and leaving in their wake a landscape dotted with small, glimmering ponds. Rain also comes to Al Anbar from thunderheads that erupt with lightning and sheets of rain that can send flash floods careening through the networks of wadis, or dry stream and riverbeds, which snake across the landscape.

In addition to providing rain and lightning, thunderheads above Al Anbar can stir up the haboob, which is a weather phenomenon associated with Middle Eastern deserts. An Arabic word meaning “strong wind,” a haboob forms when fierce downdrafts spawned by a developed cumulonimbus cell lift fine sand and dust high into the air. Haboobs can span tens of miles in length, and reach thousands of feet in height. Those who have experienced haboobs recall that they come out of nowhere and appear as a roiling wall of darkness. Haboobs move up to 50 mph, enveloping the land with dust and blistering hot winds. It can rain inside the haboob, and if the rain falls without re-evaporating before hitting the ground (a condition known as virga), a “mud storm” can form, which is one of the rarest of the atmosphere’s creations.

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—Weatherwise Contributing Editor ED DARACK is a freelance writer/photographer; visit his Web site at www.darack.com..

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