Professor Richard Washington, Professor of Climate Science at the School of Geography and the Environment; Fellow and Tutor in Geography, Keble College, gives a talk for the 2013 Oxford Alumni Weekend. In summer the central Sahara is a brutally hot and inhospitable place largely devoid of people. But it is also a critically important part of the climate system controlling the West African Monsoon and driving the largest dust emissions on the planet. Yet we have no observed data to quantify the behaviour of this system. This talk will explore how the Fennec project aimed to do the impossible and recover those all-important observations from the core of the remote desert.