Where is desert biomes located

A desert biome is generally characterized by low precipitation. Most deserts receive less than mm 10 inches of rain per year, which is less than the length of a standard ruler!

As well, the yearly evaporation is greater than the amount of rain that falls. Some deserts can reach a maximum of mm 20 inches of rain per year, but these are sometimes referred to as semi-deserts as most true deserts are much drier than this. Such low precipitation makes it a difficult place to live, because every living thing needs water to survive. So, anything that lives here has to have special adaptations to survive the extreme lack of water. As well, most deserts receive rain in short bursts, with either a lot of rain in a certain month or some rain every few weeks.

In some deserts it does not rain for years at a time. The Atacama desert in Chile, considered the driest desert on Earth, has a record of 14 years without any rainfall and some weather stations there have yet to record a drop of rain.

Soils tend to be coarse and sandy with good drainage, which further decreases water availability near the surface. Lack of vegetation also means there is little to break the wind, which moves away finer sand and dirt, leaving the coarser and heavier material behind.

Low chemical weathering of the sand and rock breakdown of rock mainly from water and other substances in the water stops deserts from forming soil horizons that are present in many ecosystems. Desert soils tend to be low to moderate in salt content, but surprisingly they can be quite fertile.

This can be seen when deserts that rarely receive rain have a downpour and the plants begin flowering and bursting to life. The seeds of these plants remain dormant a sleep-like state where an organism waits for the right time to hatch or grow for long periods of time waiting for a rain like this to occur.

Since there is low cloud cover, deserts receive a lot of sun and high amounts of radiation. Deserts in lower and higher altitudes do have some seasonality and receive lower amounts of light in the winter, while cold deserts face the extremes of having nearly constant light in the peak of summer and months of darkness in the winter.

Temperature ranges vary a lot between the different desert types but a fairly common characteristic is the drastic change between day and night temperatures. During the day most deserts are quite hot but cool off drastically at night. The main reason for this is that the lack of moisture in the air and lack of clouds allows for high radiation during the day, causing it to become very hot, and means that that heat is not trapped at all during the night.

This drastic difference is another obstacle to desert survival but also allows many organisms a chance to be active at night when it is much cooler. When warm moisture filled clouds approach a mountain, they are forced upwards.

As they go higher in the atmosphere they begin to cool, releasing the rain onto the windward side of the mountain. When the clouds reach the leeward side away from the wind of the mountain, they have very little moisture and the air is cold.

The cool air drops down the other side of the mountain and begins to warm. As air warms it absorbs moisture around it and carries it away. Therefore, mountain ranges with prevailing winds from one direction experience this rain-shadow effect, leaving one side of the mountain lush and the other side a desert. This is a common cause of semiarid deserts.

As hot air rises from the tropics at the equator, it pushes cold air away, as this cold air settles, further north and south, it begins to warm. The warm air then begins to absorb any moisture in the area and makes dry areas even dryer, which helps to form deserts below. The hot air circles back around to the tropics and cold air continues to be pushed away continuing the cycle. These circulations of hot and cold air are called Hadley Cells here is a good explanatory video from MinuteEarth. Sometimes a desert is formed because it is so far from any type of moisture that wind currents rarely carry any rain there, such as the Gobi desert in China and Mongolia.

By the time wind currents reach this area from the coast, they have virtually no moisture left in them, causing little to no rain in these regions. Currents carry the lowering dry air towards the shore but it is cooled quickly by contact with the cold water, which causes fog but does not produce conditions for rain. Additionally, this land tends to be warm, which results in fast evaporation of any of this moisture. These factors combined result in some humidity but little to no rain in coastal deserts such as the Namib Desert, that stretches along the West Coasts of Angola, Namibia, and South Africa.

That means that the desert only gets 10 percent of the rain that a rainforest gets! The temperature in the desert can change drastically from day to night because the air is so dry that heat escapes rapidly at night. The temperature also varies greatly depending on the location of the desert. Since desert conditions are so severe, the plants that live there need to have adaptations to compensate for the lack of water.

Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

Media If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. Text Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Interactives Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. Related Resources. View Collection. View Article. Deserts Explained. Desert Woodland.

View Photograph. Educational Resources in Your Inbox. Inland Sahara also receives less than 1. Soils are course-textured, shallow, rocky or gravely with good drainage and have no subsurface water. They are coarse because there is less chemical weathering.

The finer dust and sand particles are blown elsewhere, leaving heavier pieces behind. Canopy in most deserts is very rare. Plants are mainly ground-hugging shrubs and short woody trees.

Leaves are "replete" fully supported with nutrients with water-conserving characteristics. They tend to be small, thick and covered with a thick cuticle outer layer. In the cacti, the leaves are much-reduced to spines and photosynthetic activity is restricted to the stems. Some plants open their stomata microscopic openings in the epidermis of leaves that allow for gas exchange only at night when evaporation rates are lowest.

These plants include: yuccas, ocotillo, turpentine bush, prickly pears, false mesquite, sotol, ephedras, agaves and brittlebush. The animals include small nocturnal active at night carnivores. The dominant animals are burrowers and kangaroo rats. There are also insects, arachnids, reptiles and birds. The animals stay inactive in protected hideaways during the hot day and come out to forage at dusk, dawn or at night, when the desert is cooler.

The major deserts of this type include the sagebrush of Utah, Montana and Great Basin. The summers are moderately long and dry, and like hot deserts, the winters normally bring low concentrations of rainfall.

Cool nights help both plants and animals by reducing moisture loss from transpiration, sweating and breathing. Furthermore, condensation of dew caused by night cooling may equal or exceed the rainfall received by some deserts. The average rainfall ranges from cm annually.

The soil can range from sandy and fine-textured to loose rock fragments, gravel or sand. It has a fairly low salt concentration, compared to deserts which receive a lot of rain acquiring higher salt concentrations as a result.

In areas such as mountain slopes, the soil is shallow, rocky or gravely with good drainage. In the upper bajada lower slopes they are coarse-textured, rocky, well-drained and partly "laid by rock bench. The spiny nature of many plants in semiarid deserts provides protection in a hazardous environment. The large numbers of spines shade the surface enough to significantly reduce transpiration. The same may be true of the hairs on the woolly desert plants. Many plants have silvery or glossy leaves, allowing them to reflect more radiant energy.