Xtal42
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Did you click on the link before removing it? Dougweller (talk) 13:30, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
Kalahari wet season during the warmest months
editHello,
in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kalahari_Desert, you asked when the wet season occurs in the Kalahari desert
(in fact the Kalahari xeric savanna ecoregion : the vegetation there is too important to consider this region as a desert).
because there were really true contradictions in the text.
The "Kalaharian" climate is a sort of altitudinal version of the "Sahelian" climate. Both are semiarid with a short wet season occurring during the "warm" season. Due to the elevation of the Kalahari (600 to 1600 metres), the Kalaharian climate is not purely tropical as the Sahelian climate, but knows, more or less, the same aerological mechanisms.
To have an idea of the Kalaharian climate, see for instance the climograph of Bokspits, https://en.climate-data.org/location/911677/, a village in Botswana bordering the Botswana - South Africa frontier materialized by the Limpopo river (about 26°54'13.9"S 20°41'26.2"E : -26.903863, 20.690608) and facing another village on the South African side, also called Bokspits.
You will note that according to the climate-data.org data, during the six warmest months of the year (October to March), Bokspits (Botswana) receives 129 mm of precipitation that is 75% of the mean annual precipitation (171 mm). Bokspits has no real wet season but months (January to April) which are less dry than the others.
Tshane (~ 24°01'08.8"S 21°52'50.5"E : -24.019096, 21.880688) receives even 86% (=284 / 329) of precipitation from October to March (https://en.climate-data.org/location/911702/). Tshane has a true wet season which lasts 3 months (January to March).
When you go north - northeast, you arrive in the Kalahari Acacia-Baikiaea woodlands ecoregion where the climate is not truly semiarid because the wet season lasts longer and the mean annual precipitation is clearly higher (up to 500 and even 600 mm in some areas) but in this dry "forest", the heaviest rainfall is still in summer time. Carlo Colussi (talk) 13:36, 9 April 2018 (UTC)