Madrid or Mexico City: which climate?
Madrid (Spain) has a hot-summer mediterranean climate, whereas Mexico City (Mexico) has a temperate oceanic climate, according to the Köppen-Geiger classification.
The values compared here are normals computed over 86 complete calendar years, from 1940 to 2025, using ERA5 reanalysis data from the Copernicus programme. The same method and the same period apply to Madrid and to Mexico City.
Madrid and Mexico City have the same mean annual temperature, about 14.2 °C: the gap between the two cities is too small to be told apart from the noise in the data.
Mexico City gets more rain than Madrid: 909 mm per year against 430 mm.
Mexico City has warmed by +3.0 °C between 1940 and 2025, against +2.4 °C in Madrid. Mexico City is therefore warming faster than Madrid. Both trends are statistically significant.
Madrid averages 65 hot days (≥ 30 °C) and 39 frost days per year; Mexico City averages 1 and 2.
Data from ERA5 reanalysis (Copernicus Climate Change Service), redistributed under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Normals are recomputed whenever the archive is updated.
| Indicator | Madrid | Mexico City | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mean daily temperature | 14.2 °C | 13.9 °C | negligible |
| Average daily high | 19.8 °C | 20.9 °C | +1.1 °C |
| Average daily low | 8.7 °C | 8.0 °C | -0.7 °C |
| Annual rainfall | 430 mm | 909 mm | +479 mm |
| Sunshine / day | 10.3 h | 10.5 h | negligible |
| Hot days (≥ 30 °C) | 65 d/yr | 1 d/yr | -64 d/yr |
| Frost days (< 0 °C) | 39 d/yr | 2 d/yr | -37 d/yr |
| Rainy days (≥ 1 mm) | 72 d/yr | 139 d/yr | +67 d/yr |
| Mean relative humidity | 61 % | 67 % | +6 % |
| Average peak wind | 13.5 km/h | 12.1 km/h | negligible |
A difference is only reported when it exceeds the resolution of the data. ERA5 is a reanalysis on a grid of about 31 km: two nearby cities often fall in the same cell, and below half a degree you are reading the grid, not the climate.