Weather expressions: está chovendo, faz calor, tempo bom

Weather is a useful topic for everyday conversation in Brazil — in the lift, in the queue, with the taxi driver, with your neighbour who has opinions about it. The grammar behind it is oddly liberating: in these impersonal uses there is no grammatical subject and the verb stays in the third person singular; descriptions with a noun subject have agreement. Learn the three frames and you can complain about the heat like a local, and use the same frames to describe conditions and make plans.

Sentences with nobody in them

You have already learned to drop a subject you can recover from the verb ending. In an impersonal weather construction such as Chove, there is no grammatical subject to recover. These uses stay in the third person singular; the verbs can have other uses too, such as figurative chover or O dia amanheceu feio below.

Out the window

• "Está garoando desde cedo." (It's been drizzling since early on.)

• "Hoje faz um sol lindo." (It's beautifully sunny today.)

• "Está caindo um toró." (There's a downpour coming down.)

• "O céu está limpo, sem uma nuvem." (The sky is clear, not a cloud.)

Making plans

• "Amanhã não vai chover — vamos ao parque." (It's not going to rain tomorrow — let's go to the park.)

• "Com esse tempo bom, vamos fazer um churrasco." (With this good weather, let's have a barbecue.)

• "Melhor levar guarda-chuva." (Better take an umbrella.)

• "Vai fazer sol no fim de semana?" (Is it going to be sunny at the weekend?)

Impersonal fazer stays singular

In these weather and elapsed-time uses it has no grammatical subject, so it stays singular, however many degrees or days you mention:

• ❌ "Fazem 30 graus." · ✅ "Faz 30 graus."

• ❌ "Fazem dois dias que chove." · ✅ "Faz dois dias que chove."

You may hear fazem in these contexts, but the formal impersonal model is singular.

Está calor is fine too

Textbooks pair calor and frio with fazer, but Está calor and Está frio are used in everyday Brazilian speech. Keep one distinction, though:

• "Está calor." = the air is hot.

• "Estou com calor." = I feel hot.

São Paulo has been called the terra da garoa — the land of drizzle — for so long that the nickname is on souvenir mugs. A January 2025 Jornal da USP report notes that rain over the city arrives rápida, intensa e concentrada in professor Pedro Luiz Côrtes’s account, compared with its traditional drizzle, and the IAG measurements kept since the 1930s show annual rainfall climbing. Which leaves Paulistanos sheltering from downpours in a city whose nickname recalls drizzle. Sources: Jornal da USP · Band.