Madagascar’s climate is shaped by two things, the southeast trade winds and the mountains of the Central Highlands, and between them they divide the island into three zones. The east coast, facing the wind, has a hot, wet tropical rainforest climate. Toamasina gets about 3,200 mm of rain a year, and some places get up to 4,000 mm. The Central Highlands around Antananarivo, at 1,280 m, are cooler and drier, with about 1,170 mm a year. The west is drier again, and the south-west is semi-arid: Toliara gets only about 360 mm. Across the island the year has two seasons, a hot, rainy one from November to April and a cooler, drier one from May to October. The rainy season is also cyclone season. Gafilo in March 2004 and Gezani in February 2026 were among the most destructive storms ever to hit the island.
Southeast Trade Winds Against the Central Highlands
Madagascar covers 592,800 km² (228,900 sq mi) and is the world’s fourth-largest island. It lies mostly between latitudes 12°S and 26°S, so it is almost entirely within the tropics, and the Tropic of Capricorn passes just south of Toliara. Running down the middle is a spine of high ground, the Central Highlands. It rises to 2,876 m (9,436 ft) at Maromokotro in the Tsaratanana Massif in the far north. On the east side a strip of lowland about 50 km wide gives way to steep bluffs and an escarpment of about 500 m that leads up to the highlands. To the west, the land slopes down gently to the coast.
Wind does most of the rest. Most of the year the southeast trade winds blow off the Indian Ocean, driven by the Indian Ocean anticyclone, a high-pressure system that moves around over the ocean with the seasons. When this moist air reaches the eastern escarpment it is forced to rise, and it drops most of its rain on the slopes facing the sea. By the time it has crossed the highlands and gone down the other side, it has lost much of its moisture. In the hot season a northwesterly monsoon combines with the trade winds to bring the island its rainy season. More detail on the island’s relief is in our Madagascar geography guide.
Toamasina and the Rain-Soaked East Coast
Toamasina, the country’s main seaport, has a trade-wind rainforest climate with no true dry season. In its 1991–2020 table every month gets close to 100 mm of rain or more. January, February and March are the wettest months, with 412.2 mm, 438.0 mm and 454.6 mm, and even the driest month, October, gets 98.9 mm. Together the months add up to about 3,200 mm. The weather is warm and steady. The average high is 30.9 °C in February and 25.2 °C in July, the coolest month. The highest temperature recorded is 39.0 °C, in March.
Further along this coast, where the trade winds hit the escarpment hardest, rainfall can reach about 4,000 mm a year. That rain supports the Rainforests of the Atsinanana, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2007 that covers six national parks in the east, from Marojejy and Masoala in the north to Andohahela in the south. The hero photograph above shows one of them, Ranomafana, which protects more than 41,600 hectares of rainforest at 800–1,200 m. These relict forests are some of the last refuges for the island’s wildlife.
Antananarivo’s Highland Seasons at 1,280 Metres
Altitude cools the highlands, and the rain shadow dries them. Antananarivo, the capital, is at about 1,280 m (4,199 ft), and under Köppen it is subtropical highland (Cwa, close to Cwb). Its 1991–2020 normals show summer and winter much more clearly than on the coast. The mean temperature is 22.1 °C in December and 15.6 °C in July. July nights average 10.7 °C, and the record low is 5.0 °C. Rainfall averages 1,171 mm a year, and almost all of it falls between November and March. January alone brings 312.3 mm. From May to September the city gets less than 15 mm a month, and only about one day of rain in each of June to September.
The dry season in the highlands is sunny but chilly, especially in the mornings. Frost is rare in the city but common higher up, and hail falls in many highland areas, Antananarivo included. The only place in Madagascar where snow falls is the Ankaratra massif, above about 2,400 m, where it can occasionally lie for several days. The sunniest months in the capital are September and October, with about 250 hours of sunshine each, just before the rains come back.
Toliara and the Semi-Arid South-West
The west coast is drier than both the east and the highlands, because the trade winds have lost most of their moisture by the time they get there. In the north-west the result is a tropical savanna climate (Aw) with two very different halves of the year. Mahajanga, the port on the Mozambique Channel, has a wet season from November to mid-April. January brings 485.8 mm, more than Antananarivo’s wettest month. Then for six and a half months it is almost completely dry: from May to September each month gets about 4 mm of rain or less, on fewer than one day. The yearly total is about 1,376 mm, a little more than the capital’s, but nearly all of it falls in five months. Mahajanga is also hot all year. Average highs run from 31.2 °C in July to 33.3 °C in April and October, so the coast has none of the cool dry season that the highlands enjoy.
The south-west and the far south are semi-desert. Toliara, on the Mozambique Channel near the Tropic of Capricorn, is the driest of the cities here. Its 1991–2020 table adds up to about 360 mm of rain a year, and the Wikipedia geography of Madagascar gives a figure as low as 330 mm. January is the wettest month with 126.5 mm. From April to November no month gets more than 15 mm, and August has only 3.7 mm. The city records rain on about 30 days a year, against about 200 at Toamasina.
Toliara is hot and very sunny. The average high is 32.9 °C in January and February, and the record is 42.3 °C. It gets about 3,600 hours of sunshine a year, roughly half as much again as Toamasina. The vegetation fits the climate. The spiny forest of the south-west is made up of drought-adapted plants, many of them found nowhere else.
When the rains fail in the far south, people go hungry. The Malagasy word for this is kere, a famine that has come back again and again in the Deep South since the 1930s. In mid-2021 the region had its worst drought in 40 years. Some estimates put more than a million people, including nearly 460,000 children, in food insecurity. Several organisations have linked the crisis to climate change and to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cyclone Season, from Geralda in 1994 to Gezani in 2026
From November to April, tropical cyclones form over the warm South-West Indian Ocean and many of them head for Madagascar. Most come in from the direction of the Mascarene Islands and make landfall on the exposed east coast. Since the 1990s several have been especially destructive:
- Geralda (January–February 1994): the most intense tropical cyclone anywhere in the world that year. It reached 10-minute sustained winds of 205 km/h on 31 January and made landfall near Toamasina, where about 80% of the city was destroyed. Flooding killed 43 people in Antananarivo.
- Gafilo (March 2004): the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the South-West Indian Ocean. It came ashore near Antalaha on 7 March, crossed the island, then made a second landfall north of Morombe on 9 March. It killed at least 363 people and caused about US$250 million in damage.
- Enawo (March 2017): the strongest storm to hit Madagascar since Gafilo. It made landfall in the Sava Region on 7 March, killed 78 people and caused about $400 million in damage.
- Ana and Batsirai (2022): Ana’s floods in late January killed 55 people. Batsirai made landfall near Nosy Varika on 5 February and caused 121 deaths in Madagascar.
- Freddy (2023): the longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever recorded worldwide. It made landfall near Mananjary on 21 February before moving on to Mozambique and Malawi.
- Gezani (2026): made landfall near Toamasina at about 17:30 UTC on 10 February with winds of 195 km/h. It came less than two weeks after Cyclone Fytia had also struck the island. Gezani killed 59 people in Madagascar and became the costliest cyclone on record there, and it may have been one of the most intense landfalls near Toamasina in the satellite era.
The highlands weaken these storms quickly once they come ashore, but the rain they bring floods valleys a long way inland. That is how Geralda caused deaths in the capital. A 2022 analysis estimated that adapting to climate change and avoiding its environmental damage would cost Madagascar about 15% of its GDP. The wider pattern of storms in this ocean is covered in our guide to cyclones in the Indian Ocean. For travel, the dry season from about May to October is usually the easiest time, as our article on the best time to visit Madagascar explains.