01 A desert with a winter

The data are for the 1991–2020 period, with extremes collected since 1893. The annual mean is 17.5 °C, mean relative humidity 55%, and total sunshine 2,652.8 hours a year. That last figure is worth holding on to: it is a great deal of sun, and in a place with no natural shade that is not always good news.

A range of overlapping ridges fading to blue tones in the distance, with bare slopes and gullies; in the foreground a rise of dark earth with clumps of dry grass and an electricity pole with three cables crossing the frame.
The Kopet Dag south of the city. This barrier is what separates the dry Karakum interior from the Iranian side.Hans Birger Nilsen / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0·CC BY-SA 2.0

02 Summer, in figures

July has a mean high of 38.4 °C and a daily mean of 31.7. August does not drop much: a mean high of 37.2. And the lows do not rescue the night: 24.5 °C in July, 22.4 in August. Which is to say, the thermometer does not fall below the low twenties even before dawn.

In July and August mean relative humidity is 34%. The heat is dry, and that deceives: you dehydrate without noticing.

The all-time record, 47.2 °C, was measured in June 2015 — not in high August, as you might expect — and there are readings above 45 degrees in May, June, July, August and September. That is five consecutive months in which the air can turn impossible.

View from a rocky Kopet Dag slope towards an ochre, wholly dry plain crossed by dirt tracks; on the horizon, barely visible through the haze, the white line of the city's buildings.
From the Kopet Dag foothills, with the city behind. Between June and September the ground is exactly this colour.Hans Birger Nilsen / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0·CC BY 2.0

03 The 221 millimetres and where they fall

The annual total is 221 millimetres over ninety days with precipitation. But the distribution is the interesting part: March is the wettest month with 39 millimetres over thirteen days, followed by February with 32 and April with 28. At the other end, August delivers 2 millimetres over two days, and July and September 3 each.

That leaves a clear pattern: the little water there is arrives between February and May, and the rest of the year is practically dry. For the surrounding desert, those months are the difference between bare ground and a brief carpet of vegetation.

A flat expanse of pale clay cracked into curved plates lifting at the edges, filling most of the frame; a lone shrub on the left and, behind, a low bluish range under a clear sky.
A takyr: a clay pan that floods with the spring rains and cracks as it dries. It is how the landscape tells the calendar.flydime / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0·CC BY 2.0

04 The two good windows

The first is April and May. April has a mean of 17.6 °C and still some water in the ground, which is when the desert turns green and the Kopet Dag foothills stop being only ochre. May climbs to a mean of 24.1, with highs of 30.5: walkable, but not at midday.

The second, and the best, is September and October. September gives a mean of 24.3 °C with barely 3 millimetres of rain and 289 hours of sunshine; October drops to 17.1 with 12 millimetres. Long days, clean skies and nights that genuinely cool down: October's mean low is 10.8 °C.

What to avoid is just as clear. June to August for the heat, and December and January for the cold and the light: December has 104.4 hours of sunshine in the whole month, nearly three and a half times less than July. If you can only go in summer, organise the day the way it is organised in the desert: out before dawn, stop at midday, and out again late.

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AL

Ana Larrea

When To Go editor · Flowtravel

Ana reads the climate data before the guidebooks.

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