Brazzaville month by month — at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
01 A switch, not a transition
Key moments at a glance
3 mm in the whole month and the coolest of the year: highs of 28.1 °C.
10.8 mm and no rain days, with humidity already down to 73%.
71% humidity, the year's lowest, with only 4 rain days.
14 rain days and 81% humidity. The worst month of the calendar.
Adding the three months of the cut — June, July and August — gives 23.2 millimetres across a single recorded rain day. The rest of the year piles up 1,471.7 millimetres over 88 days. Same city, two different climates.
The explanation is latitude: Brazzaville lies 474 kilometres south of the equator, and its dry season starts right around the June solstice, which here is the winter one. This is not a local quirk: it is the same mechanism that distributes rain across the whole tropical band, seen from the southern hemisphere.
02 The dry season is the cool one
And here comes the second gift, because the two do not always coincide. In many tropical climates the dry season is also the hottest. Here it is the other way round: July, the month without rain, is also the coolest of the year, with a mean high of 28.1 degrees and a mean low of 19.5.
April has a mean high of 32.6 degrees and 168.8 millimetres of rain. July has 28.1 degrees and three millimetres. Four and a half degrees cooler, and fifty-six times less water.
One warning is worth adding, because the extremes in this city are surprising. The thermometer has reached 40.2 degrees and 10.3, and both records are recorded in August. Almost thirty degrees of range inside the same month. It is not the norm, but a long sleeve is worth packing for July and August nights.
03 What happens to the river
In a city whose main argument is a river, the water level matters as much as the sky. With three months without rain the Congo drops, and where it drops things appear: sandbanks in the Pool, rock platforms in the rapids downstream, walkable banks where in January there is only water.
That changes entirely what you can do. Pool Malebo, a continuous sheet in high water, becomes a mosaic of islands and pale bars. And the rapids, always spectacular, go from a mass of water to a maze of channels between bare rock.
04 And if you cannot come in the dry
If your dates fall in the wet half, one month is clearly better than the rest: February, with 136.6 millimetres over 8 days. It takes the least water of the whole season, and it rains two days in seven instead of every other day. May works similarly, with 132 millimetres also over 8 days, and adds the advantage that the cut is just around the corner.
The ones to avoid are November and December: 263.6 and 216.4 millimetres, 14 and 12 rain days, and humidity at its annual peak, 81 and 82 per cent. In a city with many unsurfaced streets, that combination decides for you which districts you can reach.
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In one sentence: July and August, no argument, and September as third choice for having the driest air of the year. It is rare for a destination to offer so clean an answer, and here it offers it in two figures: zero and zero.
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