Yaoundé month by month — at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
01 Dry does not mean clear
Key moments at a glance
189.1 hours of sun and 26.5 mm over 2.4 rain days.
21 mm in the whole month, 2.1 rain days and 186 hours of sun.
Little rain, 60.1 mm, and the year's most closed sky: 3.1 hours of sun a day.
21.3 rain days on a city of waterlogged hollows.
Translated: in July you will not get very wet, but you will spend eleven days out of twelve under a white, closed sky at 83.5% humidity. If you are coming for the landscape — and in a city of hills and inselbergs the landscape is nearly everything — that is the worst possible combination.
December totals 189.1 hours of sun and July 96.1. Twice the light in the month almost nobody picks, and half of it in the one the guides recommend.
02 Two rainy seasons and a pause
The real calendar has four stretches, not two. The dry season runs December to February. The first rainy season runs March to June, peaking in May: 198.5 millimetres over 15.5 days. Then comes the cloudy pause of July and August. And from September the second season starts, and it is the strong one.
October is the wettest month by a distance: 294.1 millimetres over 21.3 days. It rains two days out of three in October. In a city whose hollows are waterlogged élobis and whose slopes are red earth, that is not a minor nuisance: it changes what you can do.
03 December and January
The answer is short. December and January, in that order. December totals 189.1 hours of sun, the best reading of the year, with 26.5 millimetres of rain over 2.4 days. January is drier still — 21 millimetres over 2.1 days — and gives 186 hours of sun. Between them they hold everything good this climate can offer.
February works almost as well — 47.4 millimetres, 179.2 hours of sun — and adds the title of warmest month of the year, with a mean high of 31.7 degrees. If your tolerance for heat is high and you prefer long clear days, February is a perfectly reasonable alternative.
04 The temperature does not vote
What plays no part in the decision is the thermometer, and it is worth saying so before anyone wastes time on it. The mean low runs from 18.9 degrees in July and August to 19.8 in four separate months: nine-tenths of a degree of range across the whole year. It is one of the flattest series of minima you can find anywhere.
The highs move a little more, from 27.4 degrees in July and August to 31.7 in February, but four degrees change nobody's packing. The annual mean is 24.4 degrees, and that less than four degrees from the equator: the credit belongs to the 750 metres of elevation.
In one sentence: come in December or January, accept February if you cannot, and distrust anyone selling you July and August as "the dry season". On paper they are. In the sky they do not look it.
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