Home › Cities › Uganda › Gulu › Tools › Climate zone
Gulu has a tropical savanna (dry summer) climate.
Hot all year, with humid air and reliable rain — no real cool season.
What this climate feels like
The four things a regular visitor actually wants to know:
Daytime highs near 36°C most of the year. About 157 days a year above 32 °C.
Even the coolest nights stay near 19°C.
About 1574 mm of rain a year. Wettest in August.
Cloudy skies much of the year.
What "tropical savanna (dry summer)" means
Climate scientists sort every place on Earth into about 30 climate types, based on how hot, cold, wet and dry it is across the year. Gulu's type — tropical savanna (dry summer) — sits in the broad family of hot, humid climates near the equator.
Researchers write climate types as a short letter code. Here is what each letter means:
Cities with the same climate as Gulu
A tropical savanna (dry summer) climate (As) — these recognizable cities share it. If you know one of them, you know roughly what to expect.
Gulu sits near a climate boundary
This city sits right on the line between tropical savanna (dry summer) and the next type along. Different climate maps file it on different sides of that line; the lived weather doesn't change at the line — it's a naming boundary, not a wall.
Has Gulu's climate type changed?
Stable — Gulu's climate has held the same type between the 1971–2000 and 1991–2020 normals. The label is steady; the climate beneath it is still warming.
What this climate means for you
Like Aw but with the wet/dry seasons reversed — plan crops around the local rainfall pattern, not the calendar.
The dry summer is the practical travel window; wet winter is less stormy than Aw's wet summer but still humid.
Year-round heat. Less common than Aw and often a coastal microclimate — rainfall pattern depends on local geography.
Where these numbers come from
The climate type and the month-by-month figures on this page are computed from Gulu's measured 30-year climate normals (1991–2020) — the same official records behind Gulu's main climate page, so the two always agree.
Long-range climate maps measure things slightly differently and can place a city in a neighbouring category. Where they differ, this page uses the measured station record as the climate today.
Methodology & sources
Temperature & precipitation — modelled for this location from ERA5-Land reanalysis, a ~9 km global grid, because no long-record weather station is close enough to use.