By David Mac Dougall

It’s raining today in Baghdad. A full-blown thunder storm, complete with big angry clouds rumbling over the city and giant splodges of rain. Even though it’s still 90 degrees outside, this is my favorite type of weather here.

Iraq’s changing seasons really affect the way we work.

Sandstorms can keep the airport closed for days at a time, filling the air with thick swirls of yellow dust, blotting out the sun and invading every gap in clothing or windows in cars and buildings. During my first sandstorm in Iraq, the sun was so dulled by a blanket of sand that my cameraman was able to point his camera directly at the sun and film as long as he wanted.

My first winter in Baghdad - in 2003 - was cold, wet and very foggy. The nights when fog would envelope the city were the scariest, because insurgent mortar teams would use the anonymity of thick fog cover to fire at the Green Zone, where I was living at the time. They knew that the fog prevented helicopters from being launched to track them down. As each mortar attack started, an alarm sounded, and my room-mate and I would run from our trailer and head for a hardened shelter just across the street.

During the winter it rains a lot, gets pretty cold at night, and the north of Iraq has some spectacular snowy scenery. I’ve spent a fair bit of time on US military bases during rain storms. The layer of dust and loose earth which covers everything during the summer turns to glue at the first hint of water. In Mosul one year, the mud was so thick it almost pulled your boots off with every footstep. Walking around on base became a work-out in itself - taking twice as long to get anywhere because of how much the mud hampered the simple act of walking. Most buildings on base have a metal rack outside to scrape stones from your boots, and an up-turned brush to clean off the mud. After a few days of rain, this becomes an almost futile effort, because the cleaning implements themselves are clogged with mud. Everyone complains about the mud and hankers after warmer weather, but when the heat arrives, they find themselves wishing for cooler climes.

And yes, the heat in Iraq can indeed be a killer. My first summer here was insanely hot. I spent some time embedded with the US Army’s 2-8 Cav in Sadr City, but was totally unprepared for how fierce the temperatures would be. Every concrete building seemed to radiate intensely, every Humvee and Bradley and tank was scorching to the touch. Of course running around in body armor and helmet and carrying gear didn’t help much. That same summer I had to do a story inside a Baghdad power station, the whole place filled with giant pieces of machinery. The dry heat was so overwhelming that my contact lenses shriveled up and popped out of my eyes!

Just a couple of photographs to share with you from the archives today. My colleague Eric, who usually likes to take many of the pictures you see on the blog, told me that rain is boring to photograph. He says that even the cats in our garden hide from the rain (and personally, I’m all in favor of fewer cats in the yard!). One picture is a rainy rooftop in Mosul with 1-24 Stryker Battalion from November 2004. The other picture is a thermometer on a USMC patrol base in Ramadi last June. It was 115 degrees at 8am… and the day only proceeded to get hotter!