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.
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...
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.
(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.