FORECAST AFRICA
Live observations for Africa — fifty-eight countries, on one equal-area map
Africa
LOADING…Click a country for its observations and its places. Drawn in Lambert azimuthal equal-area on 3°N 19°E, in the northern Congo basin — equal-area because almost everyone arrives having seen Africa on a Mercator, where it looks about the size of Greenland instead of fourteen times larger, and azimuthal because Africa is nearly as tall as it is wide and centred on the equator, so there is no standard parallel a conic could be right about for both Tunis and Cape Town. The three dashed lines are the Tropic of Cancer, the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. Africa is the only continent crossed by all three, and between them they explain most of the weather on this page: the rain belt tracks the sun back and forth between the tropics, and the two great deserts sit almost exactly on the tropic lines where the air comes back down.
TOO SMALL TO LABEL, AND NOT TOO SMALL TO COVER
Three models
GEM · GFS · ECMWFThree national centres run a global model over this continent, and the explorer puts them on the same ground at the same instant — switching between them holds the valid time, not the forecast hour, because the three run on different cycles and +20 h on one is not +20 h on another. Pin a point and all three are read at once, in one unit system. There is no high-resolution national model over almost any of Africa, so the global guidance is the forecast here — which makes the disagreement between three centres the most useful thing on the page rather than a curiosity.
The Canadian global model
Environment and Climate Change Canada's GDPS — the member Canada contributes to the multi-model ensembles everyone else reads.
The American global model
Public domain, four cycles a day, and the guidance most national services on this continent actually run on.
The European global model
The most skilful global deterministic model in the world by most scores, and the one the others are measured against.
Compare them
One map, three centres, eight fields and ten days. Pin a point to read all three at the same instant.
Five regions
58 ENTRIES IN ALLThe largest desert on Earth, and a thin wet rim
Everything from the Mediterranean shore to the Sahel: a coastal strip that takes its rain from Atlantic and Mediterranean lows in winter, and behind it 9 million km² of desert that takes almost none at all. The interesting weather here is the boundary between them, and the dust the desert sends everywhere else.
The monsoon marches north, then back
One mechanism runs this whole region and everyone in it plans around it: the West African monsoon, which drags the rain belt from the Guinea coast to the southern Sahara between April and August and pulls it back by October. How far north it gets, and how long it stays, is the difference between a harvest and a drought for four hundred million people.
The second rainforest, and the lightning above it
The Congo basin: the largest block of tropical forest outside Amazonia, sitting on the equator where the rain belt crosses twice a year rather than once, and carrying the most intense thunderstorms measured anywhere on the planet. The coast at either end is the exception — cold current at the south, monsoon at the north.
Two rainy seasons, and the cyclones that end them
Altitude and ocean, arguing. The highlands are cool and wet where their latitude says they should be hot and dry, the Horn is a desert sitting under a monsoon, and the islands off Mozambique take the strongest tropical cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost everything here rains twice a year, and both times are short.
Under the subtropical high, between two oceans
A subcontinent held down by descending air for most of the year, with a cold current up one coast and a warm one down the other — which is why the Namib is a desert at the sea and Durban is subtropical at the same latitude. Summer rain everywhere except the one corner that takes its rain in winter.
The continent right now
LIVE READING…Every card carries the temperature at the aerodrome nearest that country's capital, from the last hour of METAR reports. A blank one is a station that has not filed — which on this continent is a real and ordinary thing, and is left blank rather than filled in with a guess.
Northern Africa
7 COUNTRIES & TERRITORIES
Western Africa
17 COUNTRIES & TERRITORIES
MauritaniaNouakchott
MaliBamako
NigerNiamey
SenegalDakar
GambiaBanjul
Cabo VerdePraia
Guinea-BissauBissau
GuineaConakry
Sierra LeoneFreetown
LiberiaMonrovia
Côte d'IvoireYamoussoukro
Burkina FasoOuagadougou
GhanaAccra
TogoLomé
BeninPorto-Novo
NigeriaAbuja
Saint HelenaJamestownMiddle Africa
9 COUNTRIES & TERRITORIES
ChadN'Djamena
Central African RepublicBangui
CameroonYaoundé
Equatorial GuineaMalabo
São Tomé and PríncipeSão Tomé
GabonLibreville
Republic of the CongoBrazzaville
DR CongoKinshasa
AngolaLuandaEastern Africa
20 COUNTRIES & TERRITORIES
South SudanJuba
EritreaAsmara
DjiboutiDjibouti
EthiopiaAddis Ababa
SomaliaMogadishu
KenyaNairobi
UgandaKampala
RwandaKigali
BurundiGitega
TanzaniaDodoma
ZambiaLusaka
MalawiLilongwe
MozambiqueMaputo
ZimbabweHarare
MadagascarAntananarivo
ComorosMoroni
MayotteMamoudzou
SeychellesVictoria
MauritiusPort Louis
RéunionSaint-DenisSouthern Africa
5 COUNTRIES & TERRITORIES
How to read this site
The observations are real, and they are aerodromes. Every number on this site is a METAR — the hourly observation an international airport files under ICAO Annex 3, moved on the WMO circuit and redistributed by NOAA. It is the only network that reaches Nouakchott, Antananarivo and Jamestown on the same terms. What it is not is a reading in the town centre: each place here names its station, how far away it is and how high, and where that gap matters — Asmara is 2,300 m above the coast station 70 km away — the page says so rather than hoping you do not notice.
The coverage is uneven, and the map says where. Africa's METAR network is roughly a fifth the density of the Americas': about 270 aerodromes file on a given day across a continent of 30 million km². Some countries have a dozen live stations and some have none at all, and a place with nothing inside 150 km carries no reading rather than one borrowed from the far side of a desert.
This is not a warning service. Fifty-eight countries and territories means fifty-eight warning authorities, in six working languages, and none of them is this site. Every country page links to the service that actually forecasts and warns for it — NiMet, SAWS, the Kenya Meteorological Department, Météo-France — and during a tropical cyclone in the southwest Indian Ocean the advisory that matters comes from RSMC La Réunion.
Also on this network
forecastamerican.com
The sibling this site is built from — fifty-five countries and territories from Nuuk to Ushuaia, on the same METAR feed and the same three-model explorer.
forecasteuro.com
ECMWF HRES, rendered globally — which is where this site's third model comes from. It also covers the Canaries and Madeira, which are on this map and not on this site.
forecastcanada.com
Environment Canada's HRDPS, RDPS and GDPS. Its global GEM is rendered worldwide rather than cropped, which is the only reason a Canadian model reaches this continent at all.
forecasteagle.com
NOAA's models on the same instrument — RRFS, HRRR, NDFD and the National Blend of Models — and the global GFS this explorer reads.
forecastmexico.com
Conagua and the SMN, two hurricane seasons at once, and four global models rendered to a Mexican window.
weather.city
Where this network covers places rather than models — forecasts, climate and records, city by city.