ABSTRACT
Early travellers crossing the Arabian Peninsula often made shrewd, if unscientific, observations about the weather and its seasonal patterns. Indeed, prior to the 1940s only a few meteorological stations existed on the Red Sea coast, Gulf of Aden and Arabian Gulf. In the immediate post-war period the need for a basic network of meteorological stations became apparent both to understand the reasons behind major breakouts of desert locusts from their spring breeding grounds in central and southern Arabia, and to provide basic environmental information for the developing oil industry in the Eastern Province. In fact, one or two of Saudi Aramco’s meteorological stations, such as that maintained at Dhahran, have the longest continuous data series available for anywhere in the Peninsula. For many variables data stretch back to the early 1950s, and in the case of rainfall, to 1939 (Williams, 1979). By the end of 1960 there were still only ten government stations but with the development of off-shore oil fields in the Arabian Gulf in the 1960s a number of marine engineering companies such as Imcos Marine Ltd acted as consultants to the oil industry and collected good information on winds and tides (Imcos Marine Ltd, 1974a, 1974b, 1976).
