Africa

Africa is the only continent that straddles the Equator with roughly equal mass on either side, reaching about 37°N at Tunisia's Ras ben Sakka and 35°S at Cape Agulhas. The result is a climate map of mirrored bands: an equatorial rainforest core in the Congo basin, tropical savanna with sharp wet and dry seasons north and south of it, semi-arid Sahel and Kalahari beyond, hyperarid desert in the Sahara — the largest hot desert on Earth — and the Namib, and Mediterranean climates at both extremities, in the Maghreb and around the Cape. The Ethiopian Highlands and the East African Rift add a substantial highland regime, with glaciers still clinging to Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, and the Rwenzori despite their equatorial latitude.

The seasonal engine is the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which slides north into the Sahel during boreal summer and south over the Zambezi basin in austral summer, switching the rains on and off across the savanna belts. Subtropical high-pressure ridges anchor the desert belts on either side, while the cold Benguela Current along the southwest coast stabilises the air and locks in Namib aridity.

The Sahara core receives less than 100 mm of rain a year, the Congo basin around 2,000 mm. Africa is also one of the regions where climate change is felt most sharply: the IPCC reports continental warming above the global average, alongside retreating equatorial glaciers and increasingly variable Sahel rainfall.

Our archive covers 15 African cities with daily ERA5 reanalysis data going back to 1940. The warmest July averages occur in Giza, around 35.6°C, while Addis Ababa records the coldest January nights near 7.8°C. Comparing the last decade against the 1940–1970 baseline, mean temperatures across these cities have risen by about 1.3°C.