{"book":"adl0980","page":61,"text":"CLIMATE\n\nAFGHANISTAN has no coastline and therefore does not benefit from the sea's mild and moist weather, because the sea breezes are blocked by the southern ranges of mountains along the Afghan border, and any precipitation they cause does not penetrate into Afghanistan. This results in mostly a rather dry and hot climate over the southern and south-western lowlands.\nSimilarly, many of the northern winds blowing over Siberia do not reach Afghanistan sufficiently to affect the weather a great deal, although those which do make winter rather severe in many parts of the country.\nOn the other hand, Afghanistan's height above sea level governs the climate considerably. Thus there are areas where the summer months are intensely hot, and there are other places where the weather is extremely mild in summer.\nClimatically speaking, Afghanistan can be divided into three regions:\nHigh regions, regions of intermediate height, and lowlands.\nThe high regions are composed of mountains and river valleys where, generally speaking, the climate is cold and the temperature variation in different seasons is considerable.\n\nPlaces above 7,500ft. generally have longer winters, sometimes extending to about seven months. Nooristan, a large section of Badakhshan and Hazarajat have this kind of weather. (Areas above 12,500ft. are uninhabitable and are usually covered with perpetual snow.)\nAreas between 4,000 and 7,500ft., such as Kabul, Ghazni, Katawaz, parts of Badakhshan and Hazarajat, the upper Kunar valley and others have a milder climate and four distinctive seasons. Summers are not very hot. Winters can be cold, sometimes reaching -4° F. (-20° C.).\nThe second category includes places at heights between 2,700—4,000ft., such as the northern slopes of the Hindukush, the foothills of the Ghor mountains, Kandahar and the lower valley of Harirud. These places have a hot summer, but their winter is not very cold, the temperature reaching to about +14° F. (-10° C.).\nThe lowlands are areas lower than 2,700ft. and include parts of northern Afghanistan, the entire south-western part and the lower Kabul valley. The summer temperature is extreme, reaching about 120° F. (48.4° C.) in the sun. The nights and winter temperatures are warm. The rainfall is the lowest there. To the south-\n\nA farm in\nNouristan.","chars":2312,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0980/00061.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":93,"title":"Afghan progress in the fourth year plan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0980/61","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0980/canvas/61","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0980/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0980_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}