Dubai in the time of scorpions

There is an old expat quip that Dubai has only “two seasons – hot and very hot” (though a stronger adjective is often used) but this is clearly nonsense. The Gulf desert climate, it turns out, is far more subtle.

The past few weeks proved this: dramatic fog at dawn – skyscrapers dissolving into milk-white air – dispersing into gloriously warm days with cool breezes, followed by evenings that carry an unexpected, stinging chill.

Local media weather reports say we are on the cusp of Gulf winter and spring. They also tell us, more evocatively, that we are in the “time of scorpions”.

I love the way the local papers do this. Gulf News and Khaleej Times are especially florid in their weather reporting, but they are only passing on the rich vocabulary of Arabic meteorology. 

I’m a sucker for this kind of extravagant phrasing. There is a moment in David Lean’s movie Lawrence of Arabia that has stayed with me for decades. Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali, robed and inscrutable, explains to Captain Lawrence that the camel party is about to cross a desert known to the Arabs as “the sun’s anvil”.

The name lands with a metallic finality. It conveys not just heat but ordeal – a landscape hammered flat by the sky itself. Long before I ever set foot in Arabia, that phrase fixed in my mind the idea that here, weather and terrain were not merely experiences but named and given character.

Living in the Gulf has confirmed that. It turns out that Arabic, and the Arab cultures shaped by desert and sea, possess a remarkably flexible lexicon for the phases and moods of climate.

Instead of the broad seasonal blocks familiar to Europeans – spring, summer, autumn, winter – there is a more granular calendar of experiential weather: cold that bites, winds that scour, rains that mark the land. 

We are in one of those named passages now. Gulf News reported recently that we are in “al aqarib” – the time of scorpions. Traditionally spanning late winter into early spring, it is so called because the cold it brings is said to sting like a scorpion: sudden and deceptive after the apparent easing of winter.

It is not the only evocative period in the old Arabian climatological year. Deep winter is “al shabat” – the harshest cold of the desert season, when wind and dryness combine to produce a penetrating chill unfamiliar to those who imagine Arabia as uniformly warm.

Late winter can bring “bard al ajuz” – literally “the old woman’s cold” – a final, sharp snap of wind and temperature that folklore says caught an elderly shepherdess unprepared.

Spring’s season of brief but violent thunderstorms are “al saraya” – fast-moving tempests that sweep the peninsula. High summer’s heat is “al qayz” – the sweltering oppression of high temperatures and humidity.

And the longed-for easing of that heat arrives with “suhail”, the rising of the star Canopus in late August, which for centuries signalled the turning of the season and the end of pearl diving.

Even rainfall carries symbolic naming. Autumn’s first showers are “al wasam”, the “marking rains” that leave visible traces of greening across the desert.

Sometimes, even the Arabs are lost for words. When the UAE experienced the extraordinary deluge of April 2024 – a meteorological event of unusual intensity rather than a named seasonal phase – local reporting fell back on “al amtar al ghazira”, meaning just “torrential rains”.

I remember it as “the time of Rolls-Royces floating down Sheikh Zayed Road”. How would you say that in Arabic? 

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Weather reporting in the Gulf often reads less like meteorology and more like storytelling: a mix between satellite forecasting and Bedouin sky-watching.

That is not accidental. A bit of research (thanks, ChatGPT) informs me that much of the Arabian weather lexicon derives from the ancient system of “an-anwa”, a pre-modern calendar linking seasonal change to the rising of specific stars.

Nomadic and maritime survival required precise knowledge of cold phases, winds, grazing conditions and rain timing. Over centuries, observation, oral transmission and early Islamic scholarship combined into a vernacular climatology of striking sophistication.

Medieval Arab scholars wrote about atmospheric phenomena, but the naming of seasons belonged first to herders, farmers and sailors and was linked to their everyday economic activity.

The contrast with Western seasonal language is striking. Europe settled on four neat astronomical divisions: equinox to solstice, solstice to equinox – orderly and scientific.

Arabia, by contrast, named weather as lived experience. Where Europe had plain “winter”, the desert had scorpions and old women and marking rains.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia

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