This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Morocco spent most of the last decade drying out. Between 2019 and 2024, the country recorded six consecutive years of below-average rainfall, the longest on record.
The 2023–24 hydrological year was the driest in more than six decades, with a national total of just 106.4 mm. But this was not simply another dry spell. The problem went far beyond rainfall.
The squeeze was structural as much as meteorological: per capita renewable water availability has fallen to about 620 cubic meters a year, exacerbating water stress, while three decades of overuse significantly reduced water levels in several aquifers. Nothing about the autumn of 2025 suggested that was about to change. The rain returned suddenly, and on a scale Morocco had not seen in a generation.
Seven years of drought ended in a single winter. Severely depleted reservoirs began filling rapidly. Rivers that had run dry started flowing again.
Now, a record-breaking El Niño is developing in the Pacific. Could it send northwestern Africa back into drought? Analysis by my colleagues and me suggests otherwise.
The answer lies thousands of kilometers away, over the North Atlantic. Most of Morocco's rain arrives in winter, carried by Atlantic storms. How many of them reach the country depends in part on the North Atlantic Oscillation, the pressure difference between the Azores and Iceland that sets the speed and position of the jet stream, the high-altitude current that acts like a highway for weather systems.
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