Most people plan a Mozambique trip around leave days and school terms, then hope the weather holds. It is worth doing it the other way round. The storm record for this coast is public, it goes back a long way, and it says something very clear about three months of the year.
July, August and September: no storms in 47 seasons
The archive holds no storm at all in the Mozambique Channel in these three months, at any strength, from 1979/80 to 2025/26. If your dates are open, go then. If they are not, the rest of this page shows how much risk the other months carry.
Across the whole record back to 1848 there is one exception: a single six-hourly fix on 22 August 1969, from a system the archive names Aline. It touches the box once and never again. July and September are empty in all 178 years.
Storms by month
February is the busiest month, with 58 storms in 47 seasons, about one a year. From May the Channel goes quiet, and it stays quiet until November.
School holidays and the storm record
Most South Africans driving up travel in a school holiday, which is the part of the plan nobody gets to choose. The winter holiday sits inside the empty months. The other three sit inside the season.
| Holiday | Dates | Storms in those months, 47 seasons | Against the record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autumn holiday 2026 | 28 March 2026 to 7 April 2026 | Mar 40 · Apr 19 | Inside the cyclone season |
| Winter holiday 2026 | 27 June 2026 to 20 July 2026 | Jun 1 · Jul 0 | Outside the cyclone season |
| Spring holiday 2026 | 24 September 2026 to 5 October 2026 | Sep 0 · Oct 3 | Edge of the season |
| Summer holiday 2026/27 | 12 December 2026 to 12 January 2027 | Dec 19 · Jan 53 | Inside the cyclone season |
| Autumn holiday 2027 | 20 March 2027 to 5 April 2027 | Mar 40 · Apr 19 | Inside the cyclone season |
| Winter holiday 2027 | 26 June 2027 to 19 July 2027 | Jun 1 · Jul 0 | Outside the cyclone season |
| Spring holiday 2027 | 2 October 2027 to 10 October 2027 | Oct 3 | Edge of the season |
School dates vary slightly by province, and independent schools set their own terms.
The strongest storms come late in the season
Sixteen storms on record reached Category 4 inside the Channel. The twelve strongest are plotted below by the month they arrived.
Four of the twelve were in March and one in April, months the monthly counts make look quieter than January and February. The tail of the season carries less weather overall and still produces the big ones. A trip in the second half of March is a different proposition from a trip in the second half of June.
How we counted
What this does not tell you
This is a record of what happened, not a forecast. Climatology counts how often something has occurred in the past. It says nothing about the season you are going to travel in. A month with a thin record can still produce a storm, and a busy month can pass without one. Over the 47 seasons counted here the Channel averaged 3.87 storms a year, the busiest seasons held seven, and 2015/16 had none at all.
A storm in the Channel is not a storm where you are. The box these counts come from is 10°S to 27°S, 32°E to 50°E, which is 17 degrees of latitude tall and takes in both the Mozambique coast and Madagascar. It answers whether there was a storm somewhere in the Channel. Where the box is drawn moves the number a long way: the same file gives 182 storms for this box and 139 for one that stops at the west coast of Madagascar.
Cyclones are one part of the weather. Rain, humidity, river levels and the state of the sand roads are a separate question, and no rainfall or road data has been pulled for this page. A quiet cyclone record for a month says nothing about whether the tracks are passable in it.
The most recent seasons can still change. NOAA marks them provisional in the file, and they were kept in rather than dropped, because leaving out the last few seasons of a 47-season count would be its own kind of distortion.
Where these numbers come from
One file, downloaded once and counted offline. Nothing here is taken from a summary, a news report or another travel site.
- Archive
- NOAA IBTrACS v04r01, International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, South Indian Ocean basin file
- Downloaded
- 9 August 2026
- Record period
- 47 seasons, 1979/80 to 2025/26. The archive itself runs back to 1847/48, and the older part of it is a record of what was observed rather than of everything that happened.
- Bounding box
- Latitude −27.0° to −10.0°, longitude 32.0° to 50.0°, inclusive on all four edges. A storm is counted if any one of its six-hourly best-track fixes falls inside that rectangle.
- Season
- A southern-hemisphere cyclone season runs from 1 July to 30 June and is labelled by the calendar year it ends in. A storm forming in November 2019 belongs to the 2019/20 season, written here as 2020.
- School terms
- South African Government (gov.za), "School calendar", archived copy of https://www.gov.za/about-sa/school-calendar, as at 21 June 2026. The page states the Department of Basic Education published both the 2026 and the 2027 school calendar on 26 February 2025.
Notes on the figures
- South African term dates differ slightly between inland and coastal provinces, and the published calendar lists both; the holiday windows here are worked out from those term dates. Independent and private schools set their own terms.
Dates are the first thing worth getting right on a Mozambique trip. Ask us about timing.