Tropics

The tropics include the following regions:

• The southern half of Mexico
• The Caribbean and Central America
• The northern half of South America
• Most of Africa
• The southern third of Middle East and southern half of India
• Southeast Asia and a small part of East Asia
• Oceania, except New Zealand and the southern half of Australia as well as some of the more southern islands of the Pacific

At the Equator, day and night are about 12 hours each around the year, with pretty much no twilight (the sun rises and sets very rapidly). Elsewhere in the tropics the day and night differ slightly depending on the time of the year but very little compared to temperate latitudes. In the tropics the sun will reach zenith on two days every year (it depends on latitude).

See also: Tropical rainforests

Save for high mountain areas, expect warm or hot weather around the year in the tropics. Seasons are defined as dry and wet; during the dry season it might not rain at all while wet seasons sometimes means more rain in a month than in a whole year in temperate destinations. The dry season is usually in the winter of that hemisphere — for instance most of Southeast Asia or the Caribbean which are north of the Equator have the driest months are between November and April. Places like central Brazil or southern Indonesia are south of the Equator and have their dry season in the Austral winter (Northern Hemisphere summer).

There are some deserts in the tropics where hardly any rain falls at all, and while +40°C (about +100°F) is almost never exceeded at the equator, in deserts such temperatures are very likely during the hottest months of the year.