Loading The Rain Year…
How much rain has fallen since the water year began on 1 September, set against the range Chefchaouen has actually seen over thirty years — with the recent run of years, and what the figures can and cannot tell you.
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154% of a typical year
1,121.9 mm so far · through 18 August 2026
The rain year is effectively over.
Almost everything in the Rif depends on how much rain falls between September and May — the olives, the goats, the cheese, the springs, and the dam that fills the town's taps. This page keeps the running count.
The band matters more than the line: a normal year here is not one number, it is anything from about 490 mm to about 1,660 mm, and knowing how wide normal is comes before knowing where this year sits in it.
That sits inside the range the middle eight years in ten have reached by this date.
The rain year (année hydrologique) begins on 1 September, and everything on this page is counted from there.
The rain year is effectively over
6 days the reanalysis has not reached yet — 19 Aug to 24 Aug — add about 0.0 mm on top.
That figure comes from a different model, which runs roughly twice as wet as the reanalysis here in the rainy months. It is shown separately and is not counted in any of the figures above.
| Through | This year | Typical | Usual range |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 Sept | 14.9 mm | 38.9 mm | 9.8 mm – 87.1 mm |
| 31 Oct | 48.6 mm | 146.2 mm | 80.7 mm – 244.5 mm |
| 30 Nov | 162.4 mm | 239.4 mm | 127.0 mm – 457.2 mm |
| 31 Dec | 344.6 mm | 340.9 mm | 199.7 mm – 639.6 mm |
| 31 Jan | 603.6 mm | 395.8 mm | 253.9 mm – 798.1 mm |
| 28 Feb | 898.3 mm | 468.8 mm | 320.7 mm – 891.3 mm |
| 31 Mar | 1,017.7 mm | 562.7 mm | 383.9 mm – 1,036.1 mm |
| 30 Apr | 1,096.8 mm | 675.0 mm | 456.9 mm – 1,120.6 mm |
| 31 May | 1,112.4 mm | 725.9 mm | 518.8 mm – 1,194.7 mm |
| 30 Jun | 1,113.9 mm | 728.5 mm | 529.7 mm – 1,197.6 mm |
| 31 Jul | 1,114.1 mm | 728.9 mm | 545.6 mm – 1,198.9 mm |
| 18 Aug | 1,121.9 mm | 729.4 mm | 549.0 mm – 1,199.3 mm |
| 31 Aug | — | 740.7 mm | 554.2 mm – 1,219.2 mm |
| Rain year | Total | Of typical | Percentile | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-25 | 821.9 mm | 111% | 57 | |
| 2023-24 | 730.3 mm | 99% | 43 | |
| 2022-23 | 613.7 mm | 83% | 23 | in the driest quarter of the baseline years |
| 2021-22 | 490.4 mm | 66% | 0 | the driest of the thirty baseline years, and the driest since |
| 2020-21 | 780.6 mm | 105% | 53 | |
| 2019-20 | 829.0 mm | 112% | 57 | |
| 2018-19 | 638.8 mm | 86% | 23 | in the driest quarter of the baseline years |
Complete rain years, read from the same reanalysis on the same day boundaries as the figures above.
“Normal” is this point's own record over the thirty rain years from September 1990 to August 2020 — 30 rain years, read from ERA5 (about 31 km).
Those years are lopsided: the middle one had 740.7 mm, while the average of all of them is 851.7 mm. A handful of very wet years pull the average up, which is why this page leads with the middle year rather than the average.
The driest of them had 490.5 mm (1998-99) and the wettest 1,661.5 mm (2009-10). The spread is the point: a year can be far from the middle and still be an ordinary year here.
“Normal” means this model's own baseline over the thirty rain years from September 1990 to August 2020, at this square — not an absolute truth about the town. Published estimates of the town's annual rainfall differ from each other and from this, which is why the percentage is the headline and the millimetres are not.
“Normal” on this page means this model's own thirty-year average at this square, which is not the same as the truth. Published estimates of Chefchaouen's yearly rainfall disagree with each other and with it: about 700 mm (NASA MERRA-2, and an Oued Laou watershed study), 878 mm (climate-data.org), 954 mm (weather-and-climate.com), and one regional source putting the province at 500–750 mm. The model's own baseline sits in the middle of that range at a median of 741 mm. A figure you have seen elsewhere is not necessarily wrong; it is measured differently.
These notes are about past years. They do not describe the figure above.
It is often said that this corner of Morocco has been in drought since 2018, and the strain on the countryside has been real: families have moved toward Tangier over water, and the Tangier–Larache axis is under long-run water stress. But the years themselves were not uniform, and the table above shows it. Set against where each year falls among the thirty baseline years: 2021-22 was the driest in the whole record, and 2018-19 and 2022-23 both sat in the driest quarter — but 2023-24 landed near the middle, and 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2024-25 all came in at or slightly above it. Four thin-to-middling years and one genuinely extreme one is a different thing from a decade without rain. It is worth saying plainly, because the difference decides what a wet winter can and cannot repair.
The province's legal rural economy is olives and goat herding, and its emblematic product — jben, the fresh goat cheese of the Rif — depends on grazing that depends on the rain. Drought in this province has not shown up mainly as empty taps in town; it has shown up as rural families leaving. The town itself grew about 8% between the 2014 and 2024 censuses while the province around it lost people.
The storms of late January 2026 refilled Barrage Chefchaouen — the town's own supply dam, commissioned in 2014 and holding about 12.2 million cubic metres in the Loukkos basin — to 100% on 20 January. By June 2026 the Loukkos basin as a whole stood at about 90.7%, against 39.5% a year earlier. Reservoir figures are published by the water administration in press releases and bulletins rather than as a feed, so they are not on this page; the links above are where to find the current ones.
These figures come from ERA5, a roughly 31 km global weather reanalysis, not from a rain gauge in the town. One model square covers the town and the mountains around it, so a storm that soaks one slope and misses another arrives here as a single average. The model reads this valley as one square about 31 km across, and it reads it low. When Chefchaouen was hit by storms over 26–29 January 2026, the Moroccan press reported more than 170 mm falling on the town; the model put 109 mm in the same four days — roughly a third short. That is the main reason this page leads with a share of a normal year rather than a number of millimetres: a model that is consistently low reads a year's shape correctly even when it gets the depth wrong.
The reanalysis is complete through 18 August 2026, about 6 days behind today. That is the date every figure above is counted to.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Generated using Copernicus Climate Change Service information; ERA5 daily data, DOI 10.24381/cds.adbb2d47. Neither Open-Meteo nor the Copernicus Climate Change Service is responsible for anything said on this page.
Source: ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0), baseline computed for the town's grid square, checked 18 August 2026 (6 days ago).
Every figure is a running total from the start of the rain year, not that month on its own.