Season Rainfall Tracker (South Africa)

Rainfall swings across large parts of the country together because of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which pushes whole regions wetter or drier in the same season rather than affecting one town at a time. Right now more towns are reading above their normal range (36 of 68) than below it (0 of 68). See our explainer on El Niño and La Niña in South Africa for how that cycle works and what it means for the season ahead.

Because they are closer together than the map can draw them apart. Sandton is about 11km from Johannesburg, which is a couple of pixels at this scale, so towns within roughly 30km of each other are drawn as a single mark placed between them. Where the towns sharing a mark do not have the same verdict, the mark is split into wedges in each of their colours rather than being given one colour, so it never reports agreement that is not there. Tap or click any mark to jump to those towns in the table, which lists every town separately.

Not the ones that matter most. Rainfall feeds dam levels, but most of South Africa's water supply problems are ageing pipes, pumps and treatment works failing faster than they are repaired, not a shortage of rain reaching the dams. See our explainer on South Africa's water infrastructure crisis for the fuller picture.

The figures come from Open-Meteo's ERA5 reanalysis, which is the same product used for a consistent, decades-long comparison, but it takes about six days to process. Data on this page is as at 2026-08-14, not today. For live conditions, check a weather forecast; this page answers a different question, how much has already fallen compared to a normal season.

Summer-rainfall towns (most of the country) are tracked against the Department of Water and Sanitation's hydrological year, 1 October to 30 September. Western Cape winter-rainfall towns use the Western Cape Water Supply System's own hydrological year, 1 November to 31 October. Towns with rain spread through the year (the southern Cape coast) are tracked against the calendar year instead, since they have no single wet season to measure "to date" within.

Open-Meteo's ERA5 reanalysis, requested explicitly rather than Open-Meteo's default blended model, so that this season's total and the 30-plus year normal it is compared against are always measured the same way. The normal is built from full past seasons of the same product at the same coordinates, not a manufacturer's rule of thumb.

It follows how South Africa's water authorities already measure the year in each region: the Department of Water and Sanitation's national hydrological year for summer-rainfall areas, and the Western Cape Water Supply System's own hydrological year for the winter-rainfall Western Cape.