Reports of wintry weather near Cairo in December 2013 travelled alongside dramatic photographs online. The original article repeated a “first in more than one hundred years” claim without a weather-station record establishing that interval.
A famous landmark needs a verified photograph
The old gallery included a snowy Sphinx image without reliable provenance. The original image set is retained as a clearly labelled archive of unverified illustrations, not evidence of conditions at Giza.
Distinguish the city, its surroundings and the wider country
A scene from another Egyptian location cannot prove snowfall in central Cairo. The useful story here is how to check a weather claim: identify the photographer, exact location, date and the kind of precipitation reported. The regional storm archive provides context without settling every viral caption.
Explore more: the wider December 2013 storm collection; another weather claim that needs better evidence.
The original report used more than one level of certainty
The feature repeated a newspaper’s century-long interval claim while also quoting a meteorological official more cautiously describing the first snow in many years. Those statements are not equivalent. A precise record interval needs a defined observation history; a broad recollection does not establish the same thing. Retaining the distinction makes it possible to describe unusual reported weather without claiming an exact record that the article does not verify.
The archived images need explicit context
The complete original image set is retained below as material that circulated with the story. Its snowy Sphinx image is unverified and must not be used as evidence of conditions at Giza. Other images also require their own place and date records before supporting a specific claim. Restoring the visual archive therefore does not endorse every caption that originally accompanied it.
A regional event can still be described accurately
The linked wider storm collection contains dated press captions for named locations, including Madinaty east of Cairo. That is a firmer starting point than a landmark image circulating without a reliable source. The useful account is the December 2013 regional weather and the way its images were shared, with the central-city record question left unconfirmed.
Sources, photography and further reading
Original feature and image attributions:
- "historic" storm in the Middle East
- typically above-freezing winter temperatures
- last recorded snowfall in Cairo was more than 100 years ago
- "first time in very many years"
- Huffington Post
- Snow Blankets Eastern Mediterranean: Israel, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus and Lebanon
- the wider December 2013 storm collection
- another weather claim that needs better evidence
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