Best time to visit Iceland
- Best months
- July, June and August
- Year
- 2001-2020
- Spread between cities
- 0 (in January)
One city in Iceland carries climate normals here, Reykjavík, and on the 2001-2020 figures its best months are July, June and August. Read it as an answer for Reykjavík rather than for every part of the country.
The numbers behind that: July in Reykjavík averages 11.1 degrees and brings about 99 mm of rain.
The months to avoid are January and December, and what decides it is the cold.
Each month is scored on its mean temperature, its rainfall and its humidity, taken from the provider twenty year normals for 2001-2020. The cities are Reykjavík. The comfort bands and the penalties are fixed and published, so a reader who disagrees with the ranking can see exactly which part of it they disagree with.
The source publishes a monthly mean and, separately, the highest and lowest values it recorded in twenty years. Those extremes are not a typical afternoon or a typical night, so nothing here is quoted as one. This page does not say what the daytime high usually is, because this source cannot say it.
Normals are not a forecast. They describe what twenty years averaged to, and any single year can sit well outside them. They also describe a model grid cell of roughly fifty kilometres rather than a weather station, so a coastal city and the sea beside it share one figure.
Best time to visit Iceland
| Month | Score | Spread between cities |
|---|---|---|
| January | 15.8 | 0 |
| February | 18.6 | 0 |
| March | 22.3 | 0 |
| April | 37.3 | 0 |
| May | 53.3 | 0 |
| June | 65.8 | 0 |
| July | 67.9 | 0 |
| August | 61 | 0 |
| September | 42.5 | 0 |
| October | 32.7 | 0 |
| November | 24.4 | 0 |
| December | 16.5 | 0 |
Questions
When is the best time to visit Iceland?
July, June and August, on the 2001-2020 normals averaged across 1 measured cities. The month by month scores are on this page, so the ranking can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Which month should be avoided?
January scores lowest across the same cities. That is an average: a country whose cities disagree will have somewhere that is pleasant in its worst month.
Is this a forecast?
No. These are twenty year normals for 2001-2020. They say what the month has usually been, not what it will be, and a single year can differ a great deal.
Related pages
Sources
- NASA POWER, https://power.larc.nasa.gov/api/temporal/climatology/point (CC BY 4.0; 'There are no restrictions on the use, access, and/or download of data from the NASA POWER Project' (AWS Open Data Registry entry))