Those swirling lines and triangular symbols on a weather map are a language. Once you can read it, a single chart tells …
Sharing your station’s data to networks like Weather Underground and the Ambient network is free, easy, and turns your h…
Measuring air temperature accurately is far harder than it looks, and most home stations get it wrong for one avoidable …
Fog is simply a cloud at ground level, but the different ways it forms explain why some mornings are socked in and other…
A heat dome can lock a region into days of dangerous, record-breaking heat. The mechanism behind it is a particular trap…
La Niña reshuffles weather patterns across the globe in broadly predictable ways. Here’s what the pattern is, and the ki…
Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, sits on the Atlantic coast of northeastern South America at the mouth of the Demerara River, on flat land largely below sea level and protected by a seawall, at approximately 6.80°N, 58.16°W. It has a tropical rainforest climate (Köppen Af) — hot and humid year-round, cooled by trade winds — with two rainy seasons and two drier spells.
There is no summer in the temperate sense: temperatures stay hot and steady, with daytime highs around 30–31°C and warm, humid nights near 24°C, tempered by the steady northeast trade winds off the Atlantic. The main rainy season runs from May to August, when heavy downpours and thunderstorms are frequent, and a shorter second wet spell comes around December and January.
There is no true winter, but the drier spells — from around February to April and again from September to November — bring more sunshine, slightly lower humidity and less rain, though showers are never far away in this equatorial climate. Temperatures barely change through the year, and the trade winds keep the coast pleasantly breezy.
Georgetown is wet, receiving on the order of 2,200–2,400 mm of rain a year, delivered in two pulses — a main wet season from May to August and a secondary one around December and January — separated by drier spells; heavy downpours regularly flood the low-lying city, which sits below sea level at high tide. Live rainfall, humidity, and pressure readings for the city are shown in the panels above.
Georgetown's most striking feature is its vulnerability: much of the city lies below sea level at high tide, protected by a long seawall and a network of drainage canals and kokers inherited from Dutch engineers. Heavy rain in either wet season, especially when it coincides with a high spring tide, can overwhelm the drainage and flood the capital, as in the devastating floods of 2005.
To follow any single measurement in Georgetown more closely, use our live instruments: the online barometer for atmospheric pressure, the thermometer for temperature, the hygrometer for humidity, the anemometer for wind speed, the wind vane for wind direction, and the rain gauge for rainfall.