Dry season

A dry season is a yearly period of low rainfall, most familiar in the tropics, that results from the seasonal shift of the tropical rain belt across the globe. When the rain belt sits over one hemisphere, roughly the southern hemisphere from November through March and the northern hemisphere from May through September, the opposite hemisphere's tropics go dry and sunny. Under the Koppen climate classification, a dry season month in a tropical climate is one in which average rainfall falls below 60 millimeters. How many dry seasons a place gets, and how long they last, depends on latitude: areas near the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn usually get one wet and one dry season a year, locations at the equator can get two of each as the rain belt passes twice, and places in between vary with local geography.