Tropical and subtropical fruits (2+1)

Dry Climate

• It is a climate in which a deficiency of moisture restricts, but not necessarily inhibit plant growth. Water is always a limiting factor in this climate. Water deficiency is taken as the sum of the monthly differences between precipitation and potential evapo-transpiration in the months receiving lower rainfall than the normal.
• On the basis of rainfall, it has been defined to be a scanty rainfall area with 0-250 mm rainfall/annum.
• In arid zone/dry climate rainfall is very low and is continued to 2- 4 ½ months and remaining dry months. The rains are also erratic and often come in a few big storms of short durations which result in great sum off losses instead of charging the soil profile resulting into soil as well as atmospheric water stress during major part of the year.
• Soils in dry land or arid areas are coarse and structure less with very low water holding capacity. Thus, dry regions have peculiar eco-climatological features and they can exist in tropics, subtropics as well as temperate zones of the world.