I can't believe that no part of the Paraguayan Chaco qualifies! I thought of it, but it's so dry that I thought there was no way it was worth putting in.
its because the technical definiton of a desert is not warm, it is based on wether a place gets less than a specific amount of rain. Canada, russia having such cold areas rain wouldn't be in the form of rain just snow and ice. Antartica is actually the worlds largest desert
The Wikipedia webpage for "desert" says: "In the Köppen climate classification system, deserts are classed as BWh (hot desert) or BWk (temperate desert)." It doesn't look like there's any BWh or BWk in Canada.
Because of a rain shadow effect from the surrounding mountains, parts of the Thompson River valley near Ashcroft, BC are arid enough to be classified as having a desert microclimate. Initially the quiz didn't count polar deserts and Canada was nevertheless not an answer because of that.
I am not sure Ashcroft gets dry enough to get a desert Koppen climate. Precipitation in Ashcroft is around 541 mm a year per Wikipedia. Just did some rough math with that chart, with an average temperature of 10.1 C, and even precipitation across the year, average precipitation would have to be ~120 mm a year to cross the line from a semi-arid to a desert koppen climate. There would need to be a microclimate with a fifth the rainfall of Ashcroft itself for somewhere near Ashcroft to have a desert koppen climate
I think the claim that Ashcroft has a desert climate comes not from a Koppen classification, but rather because Ashcroft is basically the only place in Canada which has an Arid climate per the Aridity Index, which has slightly different requirements from desert Koppen climates. It is a desert climate under that calculation.
Edit: Looking this up, seeing a claim that the actual precip in Ashcroft is actually ~200 mm. This would make a desert microclimate plausible.
@Kearsarge: The Wikipedia climate chart for Ashcroft cites a page that actually refers to Spences Bridge, which is more than 30 km south of Ashcroft, and that page is still terribly miscited, with the precipitation numbers considerably inflated. The Wikipedia page on Ashcroft also contains a link to an article on the desert microclimate around Ashcroft, which, although seemingly based on somewhat informal original research, appears to rely on accurate data as well as the Koppen classification.
The Wikipedia page listing all countries of the world by area gives a figure of 323,802 square km for Norway, but I just noticed they list Svalbard separately for some reason. This figure is used in other featured quizzes too though, so I'll leave it up to the Quizmaster.
Specify if you are including territories - the island of Nuku Hiva in French Polynesia is treelessly dry in the north and well below the level you qualify as desert, making it so that France does not count.
It seems that, according to Wikipedia, the "desert" part of Nuku-Hiva gets 510 mm of rain per year. I don't know how the rain is distributed throughout the year, but even in the most "desert-like" scenario the annual rainfall would have to be below 420 mm for it to classify by the criteria used here.
The extreme northern horn of Scandinavia, including part of Sweden and a tiny part of Finland, gets less than 400 mm of rainfall a year, so, I think this logic is then inconsistent to include Finland and Sweden but to omit other northern countries like Russia and Canada. No?
@bostjan: The Koppen classification for a desert climate that is used here depends on three variables: precipitation, its yearly distribution and average annual temperature. Low temperatures in polar regions counteract low rainfall, which is why the bitterly cold arctic Russian town of Verkhoyansk is surrounded by forest in spite of only 180 mm of annual precipitation. Russia and Canada are not excluded because of their polar regions, but because of dry areas near their southern borders.
Typical for my mind. I know almost all of the top half of the list (list of how often guessed), knew barely half of the 2nd part....but had Paraguay the first try. Sometimes i don't get my own logic. :P
Second time taking this quiz. Second time CAR being the one I missed. Second time surprised, it has no deserts. Maybe I will remember for my next attempt.
BryceBelhumeur - that's a really good one, but generally speaking such a fierce and unsolvable internal conflicts tends to happen in desert or mountainous areas, where it is not geographically possible to form a strong government (Yemen, Afghanistan, Saharan countries like Mali or Niger etc.), so that is, why I assumed.
Regular Sudan is the arid one, except for the southern bits. South Sudan has a load of swamps and tropical forests.
...Except for a few tiny pixels in the south-easternmost extreme of the country, near Ethiopia and Kenya. It's in disputed territory, so I'll leave this to Quizmaster/georgekotz to decide.
There used to be a small patch of desert depicted on the Wikipedia map near the northeast corner of Brazil (not on the coast though), in the so-called Sertão area, so Brazil was not in the initial version of the quiz, but apparently it's gone now. It's probably marginal, as for example the city of Petrolândia gets a yearly average of 430 mm of rain against a limit of around 380 mm for desert classification. I haven't found data for a specific place or city that would qualify though, so the current version is probably more accurate after all.
Hmm, Sweden and Finland are on here, but not... Ah, I can recall trekking across the great Norwegian desert on my trusty camel, sand blowing everywhere...
I’m shocked by South Sudan. It’s proximity to the Sahara desert, and it’s northern counterpart Sudan, which is basically a giant desert, really make it hard for me to fully understand how South Sudan, and even CAR, don’t have any deserts.
There are no deserts in the Philippines, but Wikipedia lists the country's area as 300,000 square km (looks like a rough approximation, but that is the listed number), so it's slightly below the cutoff.
I don't think EF climates should be considered deserts in this quiz. The only requirement for an EF climate is that no month has an average temperature over 0°C, rainfall isn't considered.
Yes, look at the points on the quiz. It says this quiz includes cold deserts and polar deserts, which are made obvious when you look at Canada’s northern areas.
Ηi, thanks for noticing! As I wrote in a comment above, those desert areas in Brazil had been edited out of the map, but they seem to have reappeared now. I'll edit and resubmit the quiz accordingly.
You can blame the Mercator projection for that. Paraguay has relatively little distortion due to its proximity to the equator, while European countries and Japan are stretched because of their high latitudes.
There were some real surprises to me as far as larger countries that did NOT make this list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada#/media/File:Canada_Köppen.svg
The Wikipedia webpage for "desert" says: "In the Köppen climate classification system, deserts are classed as BWh (hot desert) or BWk (temperate desert)." It doesn't look like there's any BWh or BWk in Canada.
I think the claim that Ashcroft has a desert climate comes not from a Koppen classification, but rather because Ashcroft is basically the only place in Canada which has an Arid climate per the Aridity Index, which has slightly different requirements from desert Koppen climates. It is a desert climate under that calculation.
Edit: Looking this up, seeing a claim that the actual precip in Ashcroft is actually ~200 mm. This would make a desert microclimate plausible.
(Haha, I'm just kidding, please don't kill me...)
BryceBelhumeur - that's a really good one, but generally speaking such a fierce and unsolvable internal conflicts tends to happen in desert or mountainous areas, where it is not geographically possible to form a strong government (Yemen, Afghanistan, Saharan countries like Mali or Niger etc.), so that is, why I assumed.
...Except for a few tiny pixels in the south-easternmost extreme of the country, near Ethiopia and Kenya. It's in disputed territory, so I'll leave this to Quizmaster/georgekotz to decide.
Sorry to all for resetting the stats.
Russia has BWk and EF
Canada has EF
Norway has EF on Svalbard