🇬🇲Gambia

Spanning 13°00′–13°50′N, The Gambia is the smallest continental African country at approximately 10,690 km², a thin sliver of land 50 km wide at most stretching 480 km inland along the lower Gambia River, fully enclosed by Senegal except at its short Atlantic coast. The terrain is entirely low-lying and rarely exceeds 50 m elevation, with the river itself navigable far inland.

The climate is uniformly tropical savanna Aw modulated by Atlantic sea-surface temperatures near the coast at Banjul, becoming hotter and more continental approaching the eastern border. The West African monsoon delivers a strongly seasonal single rainfall regime, with the cool dry Harmattan winds from the Sahara dominating the winter dry season.

Banjul averages 22°C in January and 28°C in August with 1,030 mm of rainfall almost entirely concentrated between July and September, followed by a long bone-dry season from November to May. Basse Santa Su in the far east is significantly hotter with an annual mean of 29°C and approximately 830 mm, showing stronger Harmattan dust-haze influence. Relative humidity climbs to 80–90% during the wet season and drops to 30–40% in the Harmattan months.

Major climate hazards include severe Sahel droughts—notably 1972–73 and 1982–84—that damaged peanut and rice agriculture, intensifying coastal erosion with Banjul losing 1–2 m per year in places and threatening the airport at Yundum and the historic city, recurrent severe wet-season flooding on the Gambia River with the 2022 floods displacing tens of thousands, and growing locust risk linked to wetter-than-usual desert-margin rainfall.

Our archive covers 0 Gambian cities with daily ERA5 reanalysis data going back to 1940.