The resulting work, Desert Rain, is part art installation, part interactive war game in which audience members try to rescue an assigned target.

BBC: Interactive arts: You, the audience, decide

The Mediterranean coastal fringes have a Mediterranean climate with some rain between October and March, but the vast area of desert inland has very little rain at all and here some of the highest temperatures in the world have been recorded.

BBC: Libya

Richard Hyman of Verdict Research, a retail research company, says that people will desert traditional shopping streets in favour of the rain-and car-free walkways of malls if city centres have no obvious counter-attractions such as a big department store.

ECONOMIST: Shopping

Las Vegas lies at the edge of the vast Mojave Desert, in a bowl-shaped valley in the parched rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

BBC: Discover life in the Nevada desert

Recently, the state had seen no rain for 143 days and even in a desert this is unusually severe until the drought was briefly interrupted by a downpour and a couple of showers at the beginning of March.

ECONOMIST: With drought and pollution, Arizona is full of sneezers

Chicago is dealing with a foot and a half of snow, freezing rain is falling in the Northeast and the wind chill is in the 20s here in the Sonoran Desert.

FORBES: Weather Underground unveils new look