Experts Debunk Claims of Morocco ’Stealing’ Rain from Drought-Stricken Spain

"Look at the rainfall forecasts between April 16 and 21, 2023. The Iberian peninsula is an ISLAND OF DROUGHT, but Morocco, to the south, curiously blue, irrigated and fertile." This is one of the tweets tending to make people believe that the rains are diverted from Spain to Morocco. But this is not the case, say experts consulted by Maldita.es who explain that it is "absolutely impossible" to divert rains from one place to another and that the rain recorded in Morocco in the third week of April 2023 is due to the area of low pressure over Algeria.

These publications tend to show that the rains that would correspond to Spain are diverted to Morocco so that the drought persists in the Iberian peninsula. But, the experts assure, the current period of drought is affecting Morocco more than Spain. The authors of this disinformation are based on a forecast of cumulative precipitation from Sunday, April 16 to Friday, April 21, 2023, which was published on Tuesday, April 18 and Wednesday, April 19, i.e. two or three days after the date of consultation. A mistake, according to physicist and meteorologist Isabel Moreno, who recalls that weather forecasts must be constantly updated.

The updated forecasts on Wednesday, April 19 would have predicted the arrival of rains in Portugal and Galicia and scattered rains in some areas of the west of the peninsula for Friday, April 21. "The expected precipitation in Morocco coincides with the Atlas mountain range" and would be due to "the interaction of maritime winds, laden with humidity, with the relief of this entire sector," explained Samuel Biener, a geographer from Meteored, on Wednesday. Cayetano Torres, spokesperson for the National Meteorological Agency (AEMET), shares Biener’s view, adding that an area of low pressure in Algeria was causing storms in the Moroccan Atlas regions.

In Spain, "for the moment, we are in no man’s land, between high and low pressures, so beyond a few scattered showers, stable weather dominates," Biener continued on April 19. And he added: "We think that Morocco (and other regions of North Africa) are associated with the desert when, in this mountain range [the Atlas], in certain regions, the average annual rainfall is around or more than 1,000 l/m2, much more than in many regions of Spain."