Lake · Chad · Cameroon · Nigeria · Niger
Lake Chad
Lake in Africa
- Area
- 18,752km²
- Max depth
- 10m
- Average depth
- 0.1m
- Elevation
- 282m a.s.l.
- Shoreline
- 817km
- Volume
- 2.4km³
Lake Chad is a lake in Chad. It covers 18,752 km². On average it is 0.1 m deep, and 10 m at its deepest point. Its surface lies 282 m above sea level.
Plan your visit
Stay, sail and get there
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The water
Water temperature
There is no reliable satellite record of the water temperature for this lake yet.
On the shore, afternoons reach 43 °C on average in May and 30 °C in January. The driest month is January (0 mm of rain), the wettest August (120 mm).
From above
The whole lake from space
Month by month
The year at the lake, month by month
Not a forecast: these are averages over many years. Water is the 2013–2021 average; air, rain, sun and wind are the 1991–2020 average.
Climate: 1991–2020 average
| Month | Water°C | Water high°C | Air high°C | Air low°C | Rainmm | Rainy daysdays | Sunh/day | Windkm/h |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | — | — | 30 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 10.1 | 20 |
| February | — | — | 34 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 10.2 | 20 |
| March | — | — | 38 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 10.3 | 20 |
| April | — | — | 42 | 25 | 1 | 0 | 10.5 | 17 |
| May | — | — | 43 | 28 | 6 | 2 | 10.7 | 15 |
| June | — | — | 42 | 28 | 19 | 4 | 10.3 | 14 |
| July | — | — | 38 | 26 | 77 | 15 | 9.2 | 15 |
| August | — | — | 34 | 24 | 120 | 21 | 8.7 | 13 |
| September | — | — | 37 | 24 | 41 | 12 | 9.6 | 12 |
| October | — | — | 38 | 23 | 8 | 2 | 10.1 | 15 |
| November | — | — | 35 | 18 | 0 | 0 | 10.4 | 19 |
| December | — | — | 31 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 10.1 | 19 |
Water: LakeTEMP (Landsat 8, 2013–2021). Air, rain, sun and wind: NASA POWER, 1991–2020 averages. A rainy day has at least 1 mm of rain. Sunshine hours are derived from measured solar radiation.
Size & depth
How big, how deep
- On average, water stays in the lake for about 26 days before flowing out.
- Its catchment drains 980,212 km² of land.
- About 1,085 m³ of water flow out every second, on average.
Around the shore
What's around Lake Chad
Counted within 1.5 km of the shoreline in OpenStreetMap, the map anyone can edit.
Towns on the shore
- Bol51,389 people
- Blangwa27,208 people
Nearest airport with scheduled flights: Maiduguri International Airport (MIU), 235 km in a straight line.
OpenStreetMap is built by volunteers: when a number is low, it may just mean nobody has mapped it yet.
Photos
Seen by visitors
Recent years
How each month compared
Afternoon high on the shore. The first row is the reference, the 1991–2020 average in °C; the years below show the difference from it: warmer in orange, cooler in blue.
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1991–2020 average | 30.3 | 34.3 | 38.2 | 41.8 | 42.7 | 41.5 | 37.8 | 34.4 | 36.9 | 38.0 | 34.9 | 31.1 |
| 2020 | −1.5 | −2.7 | +0.3 | +0.6 | −0.4 | +1.3 | −1.2 | −1.6 | −2.8 | −2.4 | −1.9 | +2.0 |
| 2021 | +2.1 | −1.9 | +0.2 | −0.5 | +0.5 | +0.1 | −2.2 | −0.6 | −0.9 | +0.4 | +1.8 | −0.3 |
| 2022 | −1.7 | −2.8 | −0.6 | +0.8 | −0.7 | +0.1 | −1.0 | −0.9 | −2.7 | −1.7 | −1.8 | −1.0 |
| 2023 | +1.1 | −1.2 | −0.4 | −0.3 | +0.6 | −1.9 | +2.7 | +0.7 | −0.1 | +0.1 | +1.2 | +0.4 |
| 2024 | +0.1 | −1.2 | +2.2 | +1.3 | +2.1 | +1.2 | −0.9 | −3.8 | −4.2 | −4.8 | −5.7 | −3.3 |
| 2025 | +0.3 | −0.7 | +1.0 | −0.2 | +0.6 | +0.9 | −1.8 | −1.2 | −2.3 | −1.7 | −0.4 | +2.0 |
+1 warmer than usual −1 cooler than usual
About these numbers
| Outline, area, depth, volume | HydroLAKES v1.0 (Messager et al. 2016) · CC BY 4.0 |
|---|---|
| Water temperature and ice | LakeTEMP v1 (Korver et al. 2024), Landsat 8 2013–2021 · CC BY 4.0 |
| Air, rain, sun, wind | NASA POWER, 1991–2020 · public domain |
| Names and description | Wikidata (Q125309) · CC0 |
| Around the shore | © OpenStreetMap contributors · ODbL |
| Images | EOX Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 · CC BY 4.0; Wikimedia Commons |
Every figure is an average or a count from a public dataset. Licences and methods: data sources.
