Arab Weather - The name "River of Sand" came from a video that spread several years ago across the world, depicting a rare weather phenomenon in a hot and dry region in Iraq, causing what viewers thought was a river of sand flowing through the desert.
In fact, the video clip shows a river of hail running through the desert after a rare thunderstorm on November 16, 2015, which caused rain and hailstorms in a hot and dry region of Iraq, causing a "river" of frozen water to flow through the desert.
In arid desert environments, it is common for flash floods and flash floods to move quickly downstream to areas that do not normally receive any rainfall. Therefore, the river appears in the area of torrential rains although there is no local indication of precipitation.
What appears in these rivers as sand is in fact thousands and thousands of floating hailstones, and hail is nothing but freezing rain falling in the form of small pebbles of snow.
Hail storms are common in mountainous regions, but phenomena such as the flow of a river of hail are rare. However, it also occurs in Saudi Arabia.
Here are videos of hail torrents:
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