where does it rain the most in north america
Earth rainfall climatology Most of Australia is semi-arid or desert, making it the world's driest continent. Australia's rainfall is mainly regulated by the movement of the monsoon trough during the summer rainy season, with lesser amounts falling during the winter and spring in its southernmost sections. Almost whole North Africa is semi-arid, arid or hyper-arid, containing the Sahara Desert which is the largest hot desert in the world, while central Africa (known as Sub-Saharan Africa) sees an annual rainy season regulated by the movement of the intertropical convergence zone or monsoon trough, though the Sahel Belt located at the south of the Sahara Desert knows an extremely intense and a nearly permanent dry season and only receives minimum summer rainfall. Across Asia, a large annual rainfall minimum, composed primarily of deserts, stretches from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia west-southwest through Pakistan and Iran into the Arabian Desert in Saudi Arabia. In Asia, rainfall is favored across its southern portion from India east and northeast across the Philippines and southern China into Japan due to the monsoon advecting moisture primarily from the Indian Ocean into the region. Similar, but weaker, monsoon circulations are present over North America and Australia. In Europe, the wettest regions are in the Alps and downwind of bodies of water, particularly the Atlantic west coasts. Within North America, the drier areas of the United States are the Desert Southwest, Great Basin, valleys of northeast Arizona, eastern Utah, central Wyoming, and the Columbia Basin. Other dry regions within the continent are far northern Canada and the Sonoran Desert of northwest Mexico. The Pacific Northwest United States, the Rockies of British Columbia, and the coastal ranges of Alaska are the wettest locations in North America. The equatorial region near the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), or monsoon trough, is the wettest portion of the world's continents. Annually, the rain belt within the tropics marches northward by August, then moves back southward into the Southern Hemisphere by February and March.[3]