Majuro month by month, at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
The two figures in the headline look incompatible and are not. Majuro receives 3,334 millimetres of rain a year, more than almost any capital in the world, and at the same time accumulates 2,612 hours of sunshine, around seven hours a day on average. The explanation lies in how it rains.
01 It rains a lot and the sun shines
Rain here arrives in intense, short showers, usually under half an hour, and the sky opens afterwards. There are no full days of continuous rain, which is what allows a very high annual total and very high sunshine to coexist.
The contrast with other humid capitals is useful. Suva, in Fiji, gets 2,992 millimetres a year and some 1,877 hours of sunshine; Majuro gets more water and seven hundred more hours of sun. It is a different kind of rain.
For the visitor the practical consequence is simple: you do not plan the day around the rain. You carry something to cover yourself for twenty minutes and carry on.
Key moments at a glance
194 mm and 29.9 degrees: the year's water minimum.
209 mm and the lowest average high, 29.8 degrees.
350 mm, almost double February's figure.
341 mm within the wettest quarter of the year.
02 There is no dry month, only less wet ones
The 1991-2020 normals from the international airport give a minimum of 194 millimetres in February and a maximum of 350 in October. No month falls below 190, so the word dry is always relative here.
The annual distribution is clear nonetheless: January to March hold the three lowest figures of the year, and September to November the three highest. The difference between the two blocks is around fifty per cent more water.
If you have to pick two weeks, pick them between January and March. Not because you will escape the rain, but because there is less of it and it is more spaced out, and because the sea is usually calmer for crossing to the islets.
03 The thermometer takes no part
Average highs run from 29.8 degrees in January to 30.5 in September: seven tenths of range across the whole year. The lows move even less, between 25.6 and 25.8. Temperature is simply not a variable here.
What you do notice is the humidity, high and constant, and the way it feels. Thirty degrees with high humidity and no wind weigh considerably more than thirty degrees in a dry climate.
Hence the trade wind is the real comfort factor. When it blows, the strip of land ventilates from ocean to lagoon in a few hundred metres and the feel changes completely.
04 Wind, sea and storms
The north-east trade wind blows hardest in the drier half of the year, from December to April. That cools things down, but it also raises swell on the ocean side and can complicate some short crossings within the lagoon.
As for tropical cyclones, the Marshall Islands sit on the eastern edge of the basin where north-west Pacific typhoons form. Systems usually organise further west, so direct hits are infrequent, though not impossible.
What is worth watching are high tides coinciding with heavy swell, which on an atoll under three metres high can flood stretches of the road. It is a local and occasional phenomenon, but a real one.
05 What to pack, and in short
Light, quick-drying clothes, a very thin rain shell that fits in any bag, sandals that tolerate water and strong sun protection. You need nothing warm in any month of the year.
In short: go between January and March, which holds the three months with least water; avoid September to November, the peak quarter; and forget about checking the temperature, because it will be the same whatever date you choose.
