After Seven Dry Years, Morocco Faces a Record El Niño Winter

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 such stretch on record. The 2023-24 hydrological year was the driest in more than six decades, with a national total of just 106.4 millimeters of rain. Per capita renewable water availability had fallen to about 620 cubic meters a year, and three decades of overuse had already lowered levels in several aquifers.

Then came the winter of 2025-26. Rain returned suddenly and on a scale Morocco had not seen in a generation, ending seven years of drought in a single season. Severely depleted reservoirs began filling rapidly, and rivers that had run dry started flowing again. According to an analysis republished from The Conversation, the shift traced back to the North Atlantic Oscillation, the pressure difference between the Azores and Iceland that controls the speed and position of the jet stream. Pressure fell around the Azores and rose near Iceland that winter, pushing the jet stream's fastest core toward the Moroccan coast and steering one Atlantic storm after another into the country, with the Rif and Atlas mountains lifting the moist air into especially heavy rainfall over the Sebou basin.

Now a record-breaking El Niño is developing in the Pacific, with U.S. forecasters putting the odds of a very strong event this winter above 90%. Strong El Niño winters have tended to push the North Atlantic Oscillation toward its negative phase later in the season, a shift that can send Atlantic storms farther south toward Morocco. That raises the possibility of another wet winter, but the researchers say they cannot yet say whether wet conditions or a return to drought is more likely, because El Niño influences the North Atlantic only indirectly and inconsistently.

The winter of 2025-26 itself illustrates the uncertainty. Despite the dramatic shift in atmospheric circulation that brought rain back to Morocco, the researchers found the Pacific and the North Atlantic Oscillation were effectively unrelated that season, meaning the wet winter was driven mainly by North Atlantic conditions rather than any clear Pacific signal. El Niño's link to North African rainfall has tightened since 2000, but that relationship has drifted in and out of phase for decades. During the strong El Niño of 2023-24, forecasters expected the North Atlantic Oscillation to turn negative; it never did.

The researchers conclude that northwestern Africa could still slide back into drought, but not simply because of El Niño. As they put it, El Niño may load the dice, but the North Atlantic throws them.