What kind of tropical weather and seasons will I experience?

When Australians living in and around the rainforest describe tropical weather, they generally recognize two main seasons; the ‘wet’ and the ‘dry’.

These two seasons are based mainly on the amount of rainfall.

As part of tropical monsoonal Australia, the “Wet Tropics” experiences a distinct ‘wet season’, which occurs in the southern hemisphere summer.

The southern winter is much drier in most of tropical northern Australia.

But due to the winds and local topography, the north-east Queensland region still experiences sufficient rainfall even in the so called ‘dry season’ to sustain rainforest.

In contrast to these two seasons, those people that relied on their environment the most, the indigenous Australians, described their tropical weather with many more distinct seasons throughout the year.

The number and length of the seasons varied, depending on the group and where they lived in tropical Australia.

The equatorial bulge of the planet experiences less extreme tilt than higher latitudes as the Earth rotates.

Thus, rainforest and other tropical weather ecosystems experience much less variation in sun and temperature throughout the course of the year.

In fact, it is common in equatorial areas to have larger variation in temperature from the sunlight of the day to the cool of night, than over the entire year of seasons.

However, Australian rainforest is relatively further out towards the edge of the tropics, and thus there is some variation throughout the year.

Nevertheless, temperatures on the coastal plains of north-east Queensland generally don’t vary by more than 15 degrees Celsius over the seasons, with temperatures in the high teens being the average minimums in the winter season, and early 30’s being the average maximum in the summer season. This small maximum number surprises many temperate residents, however, it is the high humidity of the wet season that makes the heat of the summer seem so much more oppressive to first time visitors to the tropics. Temperatures do of course get much lower in the higher altitude parts of the tablelands and mountains, and parts of these areas are considered to have rainforest which is more ‘sub-tropical’ in character and species composition.

In areas of the tablelands where the forest has been cleared, they may get frost in the open fields.

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