The Australian Outback

Roughly 70 percent of the Australian continent is classified as arid or semi-arid, a vast interior collectively known as the Outback and comprising several named deserts: the Great Victoria Desert, at about 348,750 square kilometers the largest, along with the Great Sandy Desert, Tanami Desert, Simpson Desert, Gibson Desert, and the stony Strzelecki and Sturt Deserts. This aridity stems from Australia's position beneath the subtropical high-pressure belt combined with the continent's extremely old, low, and flat relief, which offers little of the orographic uplift that generates rainfall elsewhere, leaving moist air from surrounding oceans largely unable to penetrate the interior.