Dubai weather by month, from the official normals

The normals, month by month

Three of those rainfall cells deserve a second look, because they are more eloquent than any sentence we could write. June: 0.02 mm. September: 0.04 mm. August: 0.003 mm. An authority publishing three thousandths of a millimetre as a monthly normal is telling you something precise.

Read the minimum column too, not just the maximum. In July and August the mean daily minimum is above 31 °C — that is the overnight low, on average, across thirty years. It is the number that decides whether an evening outdoors is pleasant, and it is the one almost nobody publishes.

Extremes within the same period

• Highest daily maximum: 48.8 °C, 3 August 2016.
• Lowest daily minimum: 7.4 °C, 17 February 1991.
• Highest daily rainfall: 90.5 mm, 12 March 1996 — more in one day than the annual normal of 79.2 mm.

State these carefully, because we do: these are the extremes within the 1991–2020 normals window, not all-time station records. The 7.4 °C figure in particular will conflict with lower all-time lows quoted elsewhere, and both can be true.

What we are not publishing, and why

• Monthly humidity. The normals carry no relative humidity row — only mean vapour pressure in hPa, which means nothing to a traveller. The only official relative humidity figures are next-day forecast ranges in the meteorological service’s daily bulletins, and a federal statistics dataset whose data year is 2017 and which was last updated in 2022.
• Sea temperature. No UAE authority publishes a monthly Gulf sea temperature for Dubai. The meteorological service publishes sea state — wave heights and descriptions like “rough” or “slight” — not temperature. Every monthly sea temperature table online is commercial.
• The April 2024 rainfall record. The figure quoted everywhere is 254.8 mm at a station in Al Ain. We could not retrieve it from anything the meteorological service publishes directly — its climate site serves no data without JavaScript, and the statement survives only in news reports. So we do not print the number. That is the rule, and this is a case where following it costs us the headline figure.
• Weather alert colours. A colour-coded warning system exists and is referenced in reporting, but the portals that would define the colours serve nothing to a reader without JavaScript, and no government page defines them. What is publishable: the national early warning system “sends text messages to people to warn them of the dangerous weather conditions”, per u.ae. For an actual forecast, the meteorological service’s dated five-day Dubai bulletin PDFs are the most defensible thing to check — they carry maximum and minimum temperature, humidity, wind, sea state and a warnings line.

The one official measure of “too hot”

The UAE publishes no heat guidance for visitors. It does publish a rule for outdoor workers, and it is the closest official proxy there is. u.ae, citing Ministerial Resolution No. 44 of 2022:

“all work performed directly under the sun and in open places shall not be allowed between the peak hours of 12.30 pm and 3 pm from 15 June to 15 September every year”

Because it is fixed in a resolution rather than announced annually, those dates and hours can be relied on. They are a labour rule, not a comfort measure — but an authority deciding that outdoor work is unsafe for two and a half hours a day across three months tells you what those months are like.

Season, and what operators publish about it

Several Dubai attractions run an explicit season, and it is obviously weather-driven — but note that no operator publishes weather as the reason, so we do not attribute it to them. Global Village publishes “Season 31: Oct 2026 – May 2027”. Dubai Miracle Garden publishes hours and the note “Seasonal opening—check schedule before travelling” without publishing its season dates on its homepage. Every published season on the site is collected on seasonal closures, and Hatta’s own window is on the Hatta page.

On Ramadan: the lunar year is about eleven days shorter than the Gregorian one, so Ramadan moves earlier each year and is currently drifting into Dubai’s cool high season rather than out of it. No authority publishes future dates — the start is announced by the moon-sighting committee under the UAE Council for Fatwa, the evening before. That is covered on Ramadan in Dubai and public holidays.

Questions nobody answers

• What is the sea temperature in March? No UAE authority publishes one.
• What is the humidity in August? No monthly normal exists.
• What does it actually feel like? No authority publishes a heat index, wet-bulb temperature or comfort index for Dubai.
• How many days will it rain during my week in March? The normal is 3.4 days across the whole month; no distribution is published, and a monthly mean cannot answer a seven-day question.
• What does a yellow alert mean? The system exists; the definitions are not retrievable.
• Is it too hot for the desert in June? The only published heat rule covers labourers, not visitors.
• How likely is fog to delay my morning flight? No published fog frequency or delay statistics — and the airport’s own weather-disruption pages are dated templates with no text in them.
• Was April 2024 a freak event or the new normal? The normals period ends in 2020 and predates it entirely.

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