Most weather pages for Nigeria open with a temperature range and a pair of month names. This one does not, and the reason is worth more to you than those numbers would be. The agency that actually forecasts Nigeria's climate publishes its outlook for every Local Government Area in the country, it revises that outlook during the season, and it did revise it this year. Any figure a guide freezes into a sentence is stale the moment the next bulletin lands. So this page tells you who publishes, what the current document says in its own words, and where you read it yourself.
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Who publishes Nigeria's climate forecast
The federal body responsible for weather and climate in Nigeria is the Nigerian Meteorological Agency, usually written as NiMet. Its annual outlook is called the Seasonal Climate Prediction. The document states that NiMet produces it annually to fulfil its statutory responsibility to advise the Government and people of Nigeria on all aspects of weather and climate. NiMet's headquarters is on Bill Clinton Drive at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Everything on this page was read from NiMet's own publication pages and its own document on 25 October 2026.
What the 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction covers
The 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction runs to 119 pages and is published free of charge in five languages: English, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin. It forecasts rainfall onset dates, rainfall cessation dates, rainfall amounts, length of the growing season, temperature, dry spells and the Little Dry Season, and it adds a crop calendar, a malaria forecast and a meningitis forecast. The foreword states that this detail is given for every Local Government Area in Nigeria. The English edition carries a creation date of 22 January 2026 and a ministerial foreword dated February 2026.
The headline outlook, in NiMet's words
The executive summary is specific. The 2026 prediction is built on a projected weak La Nina and a neutral phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, and on that basis it forecasts an early to normal onset of the rainy season, a normal to late cessation, and normal to above normal rainfall and season duration. Temperatures are expected to be above normal for most parts of the country, with both daytime and nighttime values warmer than the long-term average over most of Nigeria in January, February, March, April and May 2026.
Notice what each of those is: a comparison against a long-term average, not a figure. NiMet does publish the figures, as maps inside the document. This page does not quote a temperature range and it does not quote a humidity percentage, because the values that circulate in guides cannot be traced to any of those maps, and because a national range would be meaningless across a country that reaches from the coast to the Sahel.
Onset, cessation and the length of the season
The summary names states rather than dates. An earlier than normal onset of the rainy season was predicted over Bayelsa, Rivers, Benue and Kogi, and over parts of Kebbi, Niger, Jigawa, Katsina, Kano, Adamawa, Taraba, Oyo and Nasarawa; normal onset was forecast for most of the rest of the country, and a late onset for Borno. On cessation, most of the country was expected to see a normal end to the season, with a delayed cessation in parts of Lagos, Ogun, Anambra, Enugu, Cross River, Benue, Nasarawa and Kaduna, and an earlier one in parts of Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Imo, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Kogi and Niger. The length of the season was put at normal across most of the country, shorter than normal in parts of Borno, Yobe and Niger, and longer than normal in Lagos, Benue, Enugu and parts of Ebonyi, Ogun, Oyo, Nasarawa, Anambra, Kwara, Kebbi, Kaduna, Gombe and Taraba.
Rainfall amounts follow the same shape: below normal in parts of Katsina, Zamfara, Kwara, Oyo and Ogun, above normal in parts of Borno, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kaduna, Enugu, Cross River, Abia, Ebonyi and Akwa Ibom and in the Federal Capital Territory, and normal elsewhere. The calendar dates behind these categories exist, per Local Government Area, in the document's maps. They are not reproduced here because they cannot be reproduced accurately in prose.
Dry spells and the Little Dry Season
Two parts of the 2026 forecast are concrete enough to quote as written. For the March to May season, NiMet predicted a severe dry spell lasting more than 15 days after rainfall had established itself in Oyo and Ogun states, and a moderate dry spell of up to 15 days in Ekiti, Kogi, Osun, Ondo, Ogun, Edo, Ebonyi, Abia, Cross River and Delta and in parts of Kogi and Kwara. For the June to August season it predicted a severe dry spell that may last up to 21 days across northern and central states.
The Little Dry Season is a named feature of the southern Nigerian year, and NiMet forecast that in 2026 it was likely to commence between the 26th and 30th of July, with signs possibly showing from mid-July. It was expected to be severe in and around Lagos, Ogun and Ekiti and in parts of Oyo, lasting more than 27 days in those places, and moderate in Ondo, Edo and parts of Kwara.
The harmattan, as NiMet describes it
The harmattan is a real and officially named feature, not folklore. NiMet's own Climate and Health bulletin for the fourth quarter of 2024, listed on its publications page, sets out cold, dry, and dusty northeasterly (Harmattan) winds prevailing in the north, and warm, moist southwesterly winds dominating the south, and discusses the health implications of that split. That is the mechanism, and it is why a single national description of Nigerian weather does not work.
What NiMet does not give, in anything readable at the time of writing, is a start date and an end date for the harmattan. The only NiMet document found naming months for it is a rainfall prediction from 2014, which is far too old to put in front of a reader planning this year. So no start and end date is given here either. If you need one, ask NiMet directly through the request-data section of its site rather than trusting a date from a travel page.
NiMet's August update disagrees with its own February forecast
This is the single best argument for going to the source. The February document is built on a weak La Nina and a neutral phase of the Southern Oscillation. NiMet's Seasonal Climate Prediction Update, dated 13 August 2026, states instead: Analysis of the most recent ocean observations confirms the onset of a strong El Nino event in 2026. It adds that the pattern was expected to dominate global climate during the August to October 2026 season.
Those two statements do not reconcile, and they do not have to: a seasonal forecast is revised as the ocean is re-observed, and NiMet revised it. The practical consequence for you is simple. The annual document is the framework, the dated updates are the current position, and a guide written once and left alone is neither.
What this page cannot tell you, and where to ask
It cannot tell you how warm it will be where you are going, in degrees, because that figure sits in map form in a document this page will not misquote. It cannot give you a humidity percentage, because none was published in readable form. It cannot give you the month the rains begin in your city, because NiMet deliberately publishes that per Local Government Area and as a comparison against the local average rather than as a national calendar. None of those gaps is an accident of research; they are what the published record actually contains.
So go to NiMet. The Seasonal Climate Prediction and its language versions sit under the resources section of its site, the dated updates and bulletins under the publication section, and there is a request-data route, a map room and a weather API for anyone who needs values rather than categories. Read the most recent update before you plan around anything, and check it again when the next annual edition appears. Figures quoted on this page were read on 25 October 2026 and are reported with the date and the document they came from, which is the only form in which a climate number is worth anything.
