Deserts are dry areas of sparse or nonexistent vegetation that comprise more than one-third of the Earth's land surface if semi-arid regions are included. The general term desert usually refers to the hot, dry regions of the world. About 5 percent of the earth's land surface can be classified as hot and extremely arid, and about 15 percent as hot and arid. These areas owe their existence largely to meteorological causes, being located along the earth's two great subtropical belts of minimal rainfall or far away from centers of rainfall. Because the development and form of their ground conditions arise from past and present climates, a definition of a hot desert area from an engineering viewpoint is essentially related to climate.
Attempts to delineate boundaries of Arid Zones have resulted in the development of a number of indices of aridity, including the widely used classification of Köppen (1931). For example, Köppen suggested that boundaries could be established in terms of mean...
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Fookes, P.G. (1984). Arid lands, engineering geology . In: Finkl, C. (eds) Applied Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series, vol 3. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30842-3_3
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