Al Anbar Province: The Wild West of Iraq

摘要

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 describe the skies above Al Anbar Province 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 into 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 streams and riverbeds, which snake across the landscape.