ABOUT THIS SITE

Forecast Africa covers 58 countries and territories across Northern, Western, Middle, Eastern and Southern Africa, with 853 places reading 214 aerodrome stations. That is all fifty-four sovereign states of the African Union's continent, plus Western Sahara, Mayotte, Réunion and Saint Helena.

Four places on this map are not on this site. Spain's Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla and Portugal's Madeira are geographically African and politically European; they are covered by Forecast Euro, and this site does not duplicate them. Their aerodromes remain eligible as observations — a place on the Saharan Atlantic coast may well read a Canary Islands station, and the page says which one and how far.

Two decisions on the map are worth stating plainly. Somaliland is drawn inside Somalia, because it has no ISO country code and this site joins everything on ISO; the alternative was a 175,000 km² hole across the Horn. Western Sahara is drawn as its own entry with the flag its ISO code carries, which is the Sahrawi republic's; Morocco administers most of the territory. This site takes no position on either question and is not the place to settle one.

Every reading on this site is a METAR. A METAR is the routine observation an aerodrome files, usually hourly, in a format fixed by ICAO Annex 3. It carries temperature, dewpoint, wind, visibility, cloud and pressure. The reports move on the WMO Global Telecommunication System and NOAA redistributes the global set, through aviationweather.gov and the NWS bulk feed at tgftp.nws.noaa.gov.

Why METAR and not a forecast API. This continent has fifty-odd national meteorological services, no shared interface between them, and in a good many cases no public real-time feed at all. The free forecast aggregators that paper over that gap are non-commercial licences and this site could not use them. METAR is the one real-time network that reaches Nouakchott, Antananarivo and Jamestown on the same terms — and as a work of the United States government, NOAA's redistribution of it is in the public domain, with no key, no licence and no restriction on use.

A great deal of it is ASECNA's. Seventeen states in West and Central Africa pool their aeronautical meteorology in a single agency, and it is why the coverage map has the shape it does — the ASECNA countries file reliably even where the national civil service is thin, and most of the gaps are elsewhere.

The site does not call NOAA from your browser. A cron job fetches the stations this site uses every few minutes and writes one JSON file; your browser reads that file. So there is one request per page, it is first-party, and NOAA sees one ingest rather than one hit per reader.

A METAR is the airport, not the town. That is the single most important caveat on this site and it is why every place here shows the station it reads, how far away it is, and how high it is. Most are close enough not to matter. Some are not, and on this continent the ones that are not are usually a matter of altitude rather than distance: Africa is a continent of plateaus with escarpments at the edges, and the nearest aerodrome is very often at the bottom of one. Asmara sits at 2,300 m and the nearest coastal station is at sea level 70 km away. Any match crossing a 700 m height difference is flagged on the tile.

A station that has not filed is shown as blank, not as a guess. Coverage here is genuinely uneven and this site does not smooth it over. About 270 African aerodromes file on a given day, across 30 million km² — roughly a fifth the density of the Americas. Some countries carry a dozen live stations; several carry none at all, for reasons that range from conflict to a national network that simply does not reach the international circuit. The pages show that as it is.

Places with no station within 150 km carry no reading at all. Beyond that distance an observation stops describing the same weather — 150 km in the Sahel crosses a real rainfall gradient — and the honest answer is to say nothing. On this site roughly half the places are in that position, which is a fact about the observing network rather than about the places.

It is not a warning service, and it is not an official source. Fifty-eight countries and territories means fifty-eight warning authorities, in six working languages. Every country page links to the one that covers it. Three tropical cyclone basins touch this continent and each has its own WMO centre: RSMC La Réunion for the southwest Indian Ocean, which is the one that matters most here and the one Idai, Kenneth, Freddy and Chido all came from; RSMC New Delhi for the Arabian Sea, which reaches Somalia; and the National Hurricane Center for the North Atlantic, which reaches Cabo Verde. Most of Africa is in none of them, and those country pages say nothing about cyclones because there is nothing to say.

The country pages carry observations, not forecasts. Those are two different things and this site keeps them apart on purpose. What a METAR tells you is what the air is doing at an aerodrome right now; what a model tells you is what it might do next, and the two deserve different pages and different caveats. The forecasts are in the model explorer — three centres' global models, side by side, over the whole continent. That comparison carries more weight here than on any sibling site, because there is no high-resolution national model over almost any of Africa and the global guidance is not a cross-check on the forecast — it is the forecast.

It is an independent project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to NOAA, the National Weather Service, or any national meteorological service named on it.

The models are not rendered here. Three ingest hosts on this network already render them globally in Web Mercator and push the frames to object storage — Environment Canada's GEM by forecastcanada.com, NOAA's GFS by forecasteagle.com, ECMWF HRES by forecasteuro.com — and this site reads those buckets, proxied from its own domain. That is what the buckets are for: one render feeds every site on the network that wants it. This site runs no model ingest, downloads no model data and stores no model imagery. Forecast Mexico renders the same three models and a fourth, ECMWF's machine-learning AIFS, but crops every frame to a Mexican window, so its bucket holds nothing that reaches this continent.

Boundaries and places are Natural Earth 1:10m — the map units file rather than the countries file, because that is the one that breaks Mayotte and Réunion out of France. Public domain.

The map is Lambert azimuthal equal-area centred on 3°N 19°E, in the northern Congo basin. Equal-area is not a stylistic choice here: on the Mercator most readers have in their heads, Africa looks about the size of Greenland rather than fourteen times larger, and correcting that is the single most common factual error about the shape this map is of. Country pages use a cosine-corrected equirectangular fit to each country's own bounding box, so the country fills its frame at an honest shape.

Two islands are off the map on purpose. South Africa's Prince Edward Islands are at 46°S in the Southern Ocean and Saint Helena's Tristan da Cunha is 2,400 km south of Saint Helena. Both are administered from this continent and neither is on it; drawn in, each pulls the frame open by a dozen degrees to show a dot. They are named on their countries' pages instead.

Station positions are the NWS station database (nsd_cccc.txt), with positions for stations it does not list taken from aviationweather.gov — which on this continent means every aerodrome renamed since the table was last curated, and South Sudan's whole ICAO series, allocated in 2011.

Flags are flag-icons. Mayotte and Réunion officially fly the tricolour, so that is what their cards carry, and each says whose department it is directly underneath. Western Sahara carries the flag its ISO code carries, which is the Sahrawi republic's.

Type is Overpass, the open cut of FHWA Highway Gothic, self-hosted. The design is the U.S. MUTCD guide-sign system this whole network uses — green for guide, blue for services, brown for the land, red for warning — with the panel here in recreation brown, the colour that signs parks, forests and deserts: the land itself. Green, blue and red are already taken by Forecast Eagle, Forecast American and Forecast Canada, and brown was both the one left and the right one.