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…
Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, sits in the far northeast of Nigeria on the Sahelian plain near the shrinking Lake Chad, at approximately 11.83°N, 13.15°E. It has a hot semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh) on the edge of the Sahara — with intense heat, a single very short rainy season and a long, dusty dry season.
The hottest period comes before the rains, from March to May, when highs regularly reach 40–42°C under a merciless sun and the air is bone dry. The brief rainy season then arrives from June to September, bringing violent thunderstorms and higher humidity; August is by far the wettest month, and the heat relents only somewhat.
The cooler dry season, from November to February, brings warm, sunny days around 32–34°C and notably cool nights that can drop to 12–14°C. The Harmattan dominates, a dry, dust-laden wind off the Sahara that hazes the sky for weeks, sharply lowering humidity and visibility across the Sahelian plain.
Maiduguri is very dry, receiving only around 550–650 mm of rain a year, almost all of it in the short rainy season from June to September, with a strong August peak, while October to May is effectively rainless. The rains are erratic and drought is a chronic threat. Live rainfall, humidity, and pressure readings for the city are shown in the panels above.
Maiduguri lies on the parched Sahelian fringe near Lake Chad, which has shrunk drastically over recent decades as rainfall has faltered and irrigation has drawn it down — an environmental collapse that has driven conflict and displacement across the region. Its rainy season is among the shortest in Nigeria, barely four months long.
To follow any single measurement in Maiduguri 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.