You always hear about these extreme heat waves in India, which is still some distance from the equator, yet you never seem to hear the same from places like Brazil which are actually on the equator.
In: Planetary Science
Latitude is only *one* thing that matters when we talk about climate. Latitude tells you how much sunlight an area will get and for how long during any given part of the year.
You also have to look at things like physical geography of the land – for instance, there is a big rainforest in Brazil that helps keep temperatures a little more moderate, though there *are* parts of Brazil that get *extremely* hot. Mountains, deserts, coastlines, cities and other features all play different roles in how heat affects an area.
And the world is full of big systems moving heat around, especially through the oceans and air – even if a country is further away from the equator, it can get warmer air from outside just because of how the air moves around the earth’s atmosphere. *And* places like India are pretty big – the entire country is not going to be under a heat wave, just like the entire country of Brazil is not going to *not* be under a heat wave.
Short answer, it’s dryer there.
Slightly longer answer: the sun heats up the land that is directly below it in the tropics more than anywhere else, causing a lot of water to evaporate and the air to rise (in the inter-tropical convergence zone or ITCZ). As this hot, wet air rises, it cools down and drops a lot of the water it was carrying and cools the area below it back down. The dry air continues to move away from the ITCZ and comes down around 30 degrees north/south. Because the air is now dry, it heats more on the way down than it cooled on the way up. This is one of the causes for a lot of the deserts at around 30 degrees north/south all around the world.
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