🇰🇭Cambodia

Cambodia spans roughly 10°–15°N, a Southeast Asian country covering approximately 181,035 km² on the Indochinese peninsula bordering Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, with a 443 km coastline on the Gulf of Thailand; dominated by a low central plain around the Tonle Sap, the great seasonally-pulsing freshwater lake that grows several-fold in area during the wet season as the Mekong reverses its flow into it, and the Mekong corridor, ringed by the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest with Phnom Aural at 1,813 m as the country's highest peak, the Dangrek escarpment along the Thai border in the north, and the Annamite foothills in the east. The climate is uniformly tropical: tropical savanna (Aw) across most of the country with a tropical monsoon (Am) tendency on the wet Cardamom slopes and the southwest coast.

Phnom Penh has January highs of 32°C with nights near 22°C and April nights near 26°C, with 1,400 mm rainfall mostly from the southwest monsoon May–November, with the pre-monsoon hot season April–May averaging highs near 35°C; Siem Reap near the Tonle Sap records similar temperatures; Sihanoukville on the southwest coast sees highs of 31°C in January and 32°C in April (nights 22–25°C) with a heavy 3,200 mm; Battambang inland records highs of 32°C in January and 36°C in April (nights 20–25°C); the wet western slopes of the Cardamom Mountains receive 3,000–5,000 mm annually. Major events include the severe 2011 floods, affecting over a million people, the 2013 floods, record-low Tonle Sap water levels in 2020 amid El Niño and upstream dam impoundment, the April 2024 national record of 42.8°C at Preah Vihear, and growing pressure on the Tonle Sap from upstream Mekong dams and climate change.

Our archive covers 4 Cambodian cities with daily ERA5 reanalysis data going back to 1940. Comparing the last decade against the 1940–1970 baseline, mean temperatures across these cities have risen by about 1.5°C.