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…
Bamako, the capital of Mali, sits on the Niger River on a plain in the southwest of the country, in the Sudanian savanna belt south of the Sahara at approximately 12.65°N, 8.00°W. It has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh) bordering tropical savanna — with intense year-round heat and a single short rainy season governed by the West African monsoon.
The hottest period comes just before the rains, from March to May, when highs regularly reach 38–40°C under a relentless sun. The rainy season then arrives with the monsoon from around June to September, bringing warmer nights, higher humidity and heavy, often violent thunderstorms; August is the wettest month, and the Niger swells dramatically.
The cooler dry season, from November to February, is the most comfortable time, with warm, sunny days around 33–35°C but pleasantly cool nights that can drop to around 16–18°C. Its defining feature is the Harmattan, a dry, dusty wind blowing off the Sahara that hazes the sky, lowers humidity and can fill the air with fine sand.
Bamako receives on the order of 1,000–1,100 mm of rain a year, almost all of it in the short rainy season from June to September, with a strong August peak, while from November to April it is effectively rainless. The rains arrive as intense thunderstorms that can cause flash flooding. Live rainfall, humidity, and pressure readings for the city are shown in the panels above.
Bamako's year is a tug-of-war between the moist monsoon and the dry Sahara: for months the Harmattan blows dust down from the desert, hazing the sky, before the monsoon briefly greens the savanna with violent storms. The Niger River, which the city straddles, rises and falls dramatically with these rains, and severe flooding is a recurring risk.
To follow any single measurement in Bamako 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.