Does It Ever Rain in a Desert?

Rain falls once in a while even in the hottest parts of the desert. The average rainfall in the Sahara Desert, the world’s largest, is from five to ten inches per year in most places.

But one region of the Sahara receives just one-tenth of an inch of rain each year, and another part of the desert has gone without rain for ten years in a row!

But the driest place on earth is not in the Sahara Desert. Recently, the city of Arica, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, received just three-hundredths of an inch of rain in an average year.

And in the 19-year period from 1931 to 1960, not a single drop of rain fell in Arica!