Mediterranean climate, a climate type characterized by warm, dry, sunny summers and mostly mild, wet winters. It occurs throughout the Mediterranean basin, on the west coast of the United States, in Chile, southern and south western Australia, and the Cape Province of South Africa. The autumn and spring seasons range from mostly dry on the hot, equatorial fringes bordering deserts, to wet at the poleward fringes, where Mediterranean climates merge into those with a more or less uniform rainfall distribution as in central and western Europe.
