Snow in the Sahara
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
While it isn't a week-to-week winter norm, it isn't all that too unusual from a long term perspective. There are snows and frosts every year across the region, with heavy low altitude snows every few years. The area is fairly dry, and low dew points make it pretty easy to keep the place cool and the regions covered in snow are the same latitude as northern Texas and even higher in elevation.
To give an idea why: it's winter here at 17°C/62°F and everybody complains all the time about how cold it is, including my sister as I am typing this.
10 years ago I would have been running to the beach in the UK at anything above 12. How times have changed.
I often joke "a Brit would swim at that temperature." when someone complains about the cold. Turns out I was spot on the money.
Here: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/sep/04/algiers-city-...
“The Sahara is as large as the United States, and there are very few weather stations,” he added. “So it’s ridiculous to say that this is the first, second, third time it snowed, as nobody would know how many times it has snowed in the past unless they were there.”
"Not observed by a human" does not mean "did not happen". Humans measured things where humans lived or traveled during almost all of their existence. E.g., see Giarabub[1].
The methods we have today of inferring past events from remaining physical indicators tend to mash together decades to hundreds of years of events.
One must keep these things in mind.
On 21 January 2017, flurries from dawn until late afternoon left most of the area blanketed in snow...A month before that, there was a brief flurry of snow lasting only a couple of hours...
snow was documented over the desert in the Bechar region near Aïn Séfra in January 2012...
Before 2012, the most recent significant Saharan [sic] in this region appears to have occurred in February 1979, though it bears mentioning that a lack of social media and widespread digital cameras during these years would have made a light dusting far less global a news story.
https://fsmedia.imgix.net/b8/50/91/5c/de5d/4948/8e51/fdf72b2...