Free tools · Measured from space
Heat in Ward 20, eThekwini
No summer seen clearly enough yet.
Land surface temperature is how hot the ground itself is: roofs, roads, bare soil and leaves, as a satellite sees them from above. Landsat passes at about 10 in the morning and sees only through clear skies. It is not the air temperature a weather station gives: on a sunny day the ground is often 10 to 20 degrees hotter than the air, and hard, dark, dry surfaces heat up most while trees, grass and water stay cooler.
What it is not: not the afternoon peak, not the night, not the air you feel in the shade, and not a reading at any one house. A month with clouds rests on few clear looks.
Every summer since 1985
The shape of a year
Month by month
| Month | Land surface temperature | Clear looks |
|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| September 2026 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| August 2026 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| July 2026 | Seen too little | 0.2 |
| June 2026 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| May 2026 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| April 2026 | 28.3 °C | 0.3 |
| March 2026 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| February 2026 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| January 2026 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| December 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| November 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| October 2025 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| September 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| August 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| July 2025 | 19.4 °C | 0.3 |
| June 2025 | 18.7 °C | 0.4 |
| May 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| April 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| March 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| February 2025 | Seen too little | 0.1 |
| January 2025 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| December 2024 | Seen too little | 0.0 |
| November 2024 | Seen too little | 0.2 |
“Clear looks” is how many times the average 240 m patch of the place was seen through clear sky that month. Under one, part of the place was not seen at all, so the figure leans on the part that was.
eThekwini and its wards · Every municipality, ranked
Source
Measured from space by the American Landsat satellites: the ground, not the air.
How we worked this out
Landsat 5 to 2011, Landsat 7 to bridge the gaps, Landsat 8 and 9 from 2013: different satellites pass at slightly different times, so compare summers within the same years first.
What we changed: we kept only the clear land cells (no cloud, cloud shadow, snow or water, with a margin round each cloud), read them at 480 m, and averaged them over each 2026 ward each month; larger places are the sums of their wards.
Landsat imagery courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey (Landsat Collection 2 surface temperature, through Digital Earth Africa’s copy).
Dataset: land surface temperature by ward, release of 13 November 2026.