Weather expressions: está chovendo, faz calor, tempo bom

• Weather verbs take no subject at all and stay in the third person singular

• estar + gerund = happening now: está chovendo, está ventando, está esfriando

• fazer = the day overall: faz calor, faz frio, faz sol, faz 30 graus — never plural

• tempo / dia / céu + adjective = describing it: o tempo está bom, o dia está nublado

• tem = there is: tem sol, tem vento, tem neblina

• Tempo means both weather and time; clima means climate

• Small talk: "Que calor, né?" · forecast words: previsão, pancadas de chuva, sensação térmica

Weather is the safest conversation in Brazil and the one you will have most often — 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: these are the only sentences in the language where nobody is doing anything, so there is no subject to get wrong and no ending to conjugate beyond the third person singular. Learn the three frames and you can complain about the heat like a local, which is roughly ninety percent of what the frames get used for.

Sentences with nobody in them

You have already learned to drop a subject you can recover from the verb ending. Weather is different: there is no subject to recover. Portuguese simply has a set of verbs that refuse to take one, and they sit permanently in the third person singular.

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?)

Fazer never goes plural

It has no subject, so there is nothing to agree with — however many degrees or days you mention:

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

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

Plenty of Brazilians slip and say fazem here; it is one of the classic corrections in Portuguese class.

Está calor is fine too

Textbooks pair calor and frio with fazer, but Está calor and Está frio are everywhere in speech, and nobody blinks. 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. It has now outlived the weather: USP researchers report that rain over the city arrives rápida, intensa e concentrada rather than as drizzle, and the IAG measurements kept since the 1930s show annual rainfall climbing. Which leaves Paulistanos sheltering from downpours in a city named after a drizzle. Sources: Jornal da USP · Band.