Porto Alegre Weather: Hot, Wet or Both

In Rio de Janeiro I've heard several of the locals say they have two seasons; summer and hell. It's fair to say the heat in Rio can be tough to handle, but with huge stretches of beaches to escape to when the sun comes out, it is at least a little negated.

We don't have that in Porto Alegre. While it may not be as hot as Rio, the summer has definitely proven to be hotter than I'd like and without the escape of the beach, some of the days here have been very hard to deal with.

In the four short months I've been in Porto Alegre, I've found there has been very little “middle ground” with the weather. So far I've seen three weather types:

• Hot;
• Wet;
• Hot and Wet.

Porto Alegre on one of it's mild days

Arriving in late September, the rain that was hitting the city (and the whole state of Rio Grande do Sul) was unlike anything I had seen. Days would go by where it wouldn't have stopped raining for more than a few minutes. Not just light rain either. Torrential downpours that seemed to flood the streets instantly.

Flooding was a huge issue throughout the spring, with many areas in the countryside flooded and people all over left without power for days or even weeks on end. While in the neighbourhood I'm in we managed to avoid that, it was easy to see the city wasn't built to handle this kind of rain. Every local told me, “this rain is not normal” or told that it was a record week or due to El Niño and wouldn't continue. But it kept going. I got a bit of cabin fever after days and days of not being able to leave the house.

Then all of a sudden it stopped, but before I had a chance to celebrate, a new problem. The heat.

I'd heard people use the term “Forno Alegre” several times but never really understood it until the summer kicked in. Forno, the Portuguese word for “oven” eventually seemed the perfect term for the climate I was now enduring. For weeks the temperature has been hitting the mid 30's (C) during the day and getting no cooler than the low 20s over night with a humidity that would make you think we're in the middle of a tropical rain forest. That humidity, always in the air, also means that at any time we could be back to rain and flooding.

Trees down across Rua Republica

Like any region with high heat and humidity, Porto Alegre is prone to storms and on Friday night, we got a big one. A Super cell storm hit – last only a couple of hours – but doing a huge amount of damage to the city. Like with the excess spring rain, the storm was something the locals assured was completely not normal. Winds of up to 127 km/h uprooted trees collapsed buildings and took down power lines all over the city.

Along with it's heat, Porto Alegre is also known for having the most trees of any capital in Brazil, but in the storm this worked against us. At least 300 trees were ripped out of the ground during the storm, destroying cars, taking down power lines and even the occasional building. While there were at least 100 storm related injuries, according to reports there was fortunately nothing serious.

A Service station taken down by the storm

The aftermath of the storm did cause chaos however. Driving became treacherous (ok, more so than usual Brazil driving) with many roads blocked due to trees or flooding and power outages causing the traffic lights all over the city to fail. Many businesses were forced to close due to lack of power or just from being cut off from their customers.

Thousands of homes across the city lost not only power, but also water making life especially difficult for those with families – especially with nearby businesses also cut off.

Trees were uprooted all over the city

On Tuesday morning – around 84 hours after the storm – our apartment had it's power restored and life began to go back to normal. Although at the time of writing this, a new storm has moved through and is currently lashing the city with more rain and once again our power is gone.

I know it may sound like I'm doing an awfully lot of complaining about the weather because, well I am. Porto Alegre has a lot of great qualities, the weather just isn't one of them.