Morocco went nearly seven years without a normal rainy season. Then, in a single winter, the drought broke. The reversal in 2025-26 refilled reservoirs that had sat dangerously low for years, closing out the country's driest stretch on record. Now scientists are asking what a forming super El Nino means for the winter ahead, and the honest answer is that nobody is entirely sure.
The scale of the drought that just ended was severe. Rainfall ran below average for six consecutive years from 2019 to 2024, the longest such stretch on record for the country. The 2023-24 hydrological year was the driest in more than 60 years, with just 106.4mm of rainfall recorded nationally. Per-capita renewable water availability fell to roughly 620 cubic metres annually, a level water planners regard as a marker of serious scarcity.
A strong El Nino is now forming in the Pacific. The United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts the probability of a very strong event this winter above 90%, and most climate models point to an exceptionally strong event. In many parts of the world, that kind of signal makes seasonal rainfall easier to forecast months in advance. The same El Nino is already straining harvests thousands of kilometres away, where drought grips Central America’s Dry Corridor.
Why El Nino complicates this winter's forecast
Morocco is a harder case. Researcher Hossein Bonakdari, who has analysed El Nino's potential effects on north-west Africa, says the link between Pacific conditions and Moroccan rainfall is indirect and uncertain. The North Atlantic Oscillation is a separate atmospheric pattern. It shifts moisture-bearing storms toward or away from the region. It may matter more than El Nino itself for how the coming winter actually unfolds, Bonakdari's research suggests.
That uncertainty is not theoretical. During the last strong El Nino event, in 2023-24, forecasters expected the North Atlantic Oscillation to settle into a negative phase associated with wetter conditions in Morocco. It never did. The country's driest year on record followed instead, a reminder that a strong Pacific signal does not guarantee a particular outcome thousands of kilometres away in North Africa.
From drought to flood risk in the same season
The stakes of getting the forecast wrong run in both directions. Morocco spent years managing acute water scarcity, rationing supplies to farms and cities alike as reservoirs dropped toward record lows. The winter 2025-26 rains solved that problem abruptly, refilling dams that had taken years to empty. Infrastructure and soils built up over years of scarcity are not designed to absorb sudden, heavy rainfall. A repeat of that kind of downpour this winter raises a different risk. It could bring flash flooding to a landscape still adjusting to the end of a multi-year drought, rather than the steady replenishment planners would prefer.
Bonakdari's analysis frames El Nino as changing the odds rather than dictating the outcome. Pacific conditions can tilt the atmosphere toward wetter or drier patterns over North Africa. The North Atlantic's own internal variability still decides whether that moisture actually arrives, and by how much. For Morocco's farmers, many still recovering from years of reduced planting and livestock losses during the drought, that means another winter of watching two oceans at once. There is no reliable way to know which way this one will go until the rains either come, or do not.
Water authorities have not announced changes to reservoir management rules ahead of the new rainy season, which typically begins in November. Officials say current reserves, rebuilt by last winter's rains, give the country more flexibility than it had entering the drought years. Agricultural planners are watching the same forecasts as everyone else, aware that both too little rain and too much, arriving too quickly, carry real costs for farms still rebuilding herds and orchards lost during the seven dry years.
