Motorcycle riding weather by month

How we rate months

A month starts as Good. Each rule it meets lowers it; the lowest rating wins.

• Poor if any of: 300 mm or more of rain, or 9 or more days with 10 mm or more; average high of 38 °C or more; average low of −5 °C or below, or average high below 5 °C; average PM2.5 of 55 µg/m³ or more (smoke or smog).
• Mixed if any of: 120 mm or more of rain, 5 or more days with 10 mm or more, or 22 or more rain days; average high of 35 °C or more; average low below 5 °C, or average high below 12 °C; average PM2.5 of 35 µg/m³ or more.

Some seasonal facts don't show in monthly averages, such as smoke from the burning season in northern Thailand or snow closing the passes to Ladakh. Where they are well documented we add a short note with its source, and a few of those notes also lower the rating for the months they cover. PM2.5 is only measured for regions where smoke haze is a known problem.

Where the numbers come from

Daily highs, lows and rain for 2015 to 2024 from the Open-Meteo historical weather API, which serves the ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis from the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Rain days are days with at least 1 mm. Temperatures are corrected to a typical riding elevation for each region, so a mountain loop is not rated by the town at its foot. Reanalysis is a model of the weather on a grid about 9 to 25 km wide: it smooths out mountains and local thunderstorms and tends to count more light-rain days than a rain gauge would, so read the figures as a regional picture. PM2.5 comes from the CAMS global model through the Open-Meteo air quality API for August 2022 onwards; it reads lower than ground monitors during heavy smoke.

Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service and Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service information.