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
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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