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The range of temperatures on a daily and annual scale is relatively low, being 11 °C (20 °F) and 5 °C (9 °F) respectively in the Atacama Desert. Deserts of this type are often long and narrow and bounded to the east by mountain ranges. They occur in Namibia, Chile, southern California and Baja California.
This list of North American deserts identifies areas of the continent that receive less than 10 in (250 mm) annual precipitation. The "North American Desert" is also the term for a large U.S. Level 1 ecoregion (EPA) [ 1 ] of the North American Cordillera , in the Deserts and xeric shrublands biome (WWF).
Covering 14.2% of Earth's land area, hot deserts are the second-most common type of climate on Earth after the Polar climate. [1] There are two variations of a desert climate according to the Köppen climate classification: a hot desert climate (BWh), and a cold desert climate (BWk).
Arctic Desert – the second largest "desert" in the world, though it consists of frozen ocean, land ice, and tundra, so (like the rest of this section) not a desert climate in any conventional sense North American Arctic – a large tundra in Northern America. Greenland – mostly covered by land ice, like Antarctica
Drylands cover 41.3% of the Earth's land surface, including 15% of Latin America, 66% of Africa, 40% of Asia, and 24% of Europe. There is a significantly greater proportion of drylands in developing countries (72%), and the proportion increases with aridity : almost 100% of all hyper-arid lands are in the developing world.
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.
Many deserts, such as the Sahara, are hot year-round, but others, such as East Asia's Gobi Desert, become quite cold during the winter. [1] Temperature extremes are a characteristic of most deserts. High daytime temperatures give way to cold nights because there is no insulation provided by humidity and cloud cover. The diversity of climatic ...
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.