Al Jawf ( ar, الجوف ') is a town in southeastern

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...

, the capital of the

Kufra Kufra () is a basinBertarelli (1929), p. 514. and oasis group in the Kufra District of southeastern Cyrenaica in Libya. At the end of nineteenth century Kufra became the centre and holy place of the Senussi order. It also played a minor role ...

district in

. The city has an elevation of 382.2 m (1,254 feet). In a 1984

census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses inc ...

the city's population was 17,320. Al Jawf receives almost no rain whatsoever, averaging only 2.5mm (.1 inch) per year. Summer high temperatures average above 37.8 °C (100 °F). The city lies in the largest oasis in the

basin,Bertarelli (1929), p. 514. extracting the water from the

Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS) is the world's largest known fossil water aquifer system. It is located underground in the Eastern end of the Sahara desert and spans the political boundaries of four countries in north-eastern Africa. N ...

. It is one of the most heavily irrigated

oases In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment'ksar''with its surrounding feeding source, the palm grove, within a relational and circulatory nomadic system.” The location of oases has been of critical im ...

in the

Sahara , photo = Sahara real color.jpg , photo_caption = The Sahara taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, 1972 , map = , map_image = , location = , country = , country1 = , ...

. The surrounding area contains clusters of

center-pivot irrigation Center-pivot irrigation (sometimes called central pivot irrigation), also called water-wheel and circle irrigation, is a method of crop irrigation in which equipment rotates around a pivot and crops are watered with sprinklers. A circular area ...

systems used for agriculture. The distinctive pattern was photographed from orbit by the crew of the International Space Station in 2016. Al Jawf, Libya

Climate

Al Jawf has a

hot desert climate The desert climate or arid climate (in the Köppen climate classification ''BWh'' and ''BWk''), is a dry climate sub-type in which there is a severe excess of evaporation over precipitation. The typically bald, rocky, or sandy surfaces in desert ...

(

Köppen climate classification The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, nota ...

''BWh'').

Sources

References

{{District capitals of Libya Populated places in Kufra District Cyrenaica