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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Town Tools builds free, public tools for Chefchaouen and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.

This year against its own band

Month by month

Through	This year	Typical	Usual range
30 Sept	9.9 mm	38.9 mm	9.8 mm – 87.1 mm
6 Oct	17.7 mm	51.3 mm	17.6 mm – 104.2 mm
31 Oct	—	146.2 mm	80.7 mm – 244.5 mm
30 Nov	—	239.4 mm	127.0 mm – 457.2 mm
31 Dec	—	340.9 mm	199.7 mm – 639.6 mm
31 Jan	—	395.8 mm	253.9 mm – 798.1 mm
28 Feb	—	468.8 mm	320.7 mm – 891.3 mm
31 Mar	—	562.7 mm	383.9 mm – 1,036.1 mm
30 Apr	—	675.0 mm	456.9 mm – 1,120.6 mm
31 May	—	725.9 mm	518.8 mm – 1,194.7 mm
30 Jun	—	728.5 mm	529.7 mm – 1,197.6 mm
31 Jul	—	728.9 mm	545.6 mm – 1,198.9 mm
31 Aug	—	740.7 mm	554.2 mm – 1,219.2 mm

Every figure is a running total from the start of the rain year, not that month on its own.

The rain years before this one

Rain year	Total	Of typical	Percentile	Note
2025-26	1,114.5 mm	150%	77	the wettest of the last seven years; the January 2026 storms filled the town's dam
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.

What “normal” means on this page

“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.

The longer story

These notes are about past years. They do not describe the figure above.

One very dry year, not eight

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. The year just ended, 2025-26, was the wettest of the seven, well above the middle. 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.

What a short year costs here

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 winter the dam filled

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.

Where the water picture is published

Maâ Dialna — the ministry's water portalThe Moroccan water administration's own site, in Arabic. It carries the daily rainfall bulletin by province and the dam situation — the figures the news reports.

Direction Générale de la MétéorologieMorocco's national weather service, and the authority on what the weather has actually done.

Vigilance Météo MarocOfficial weather warnings — heavy rain, storms, heat. This page is a running total and is not a warning service.

Open-MeteoWhere the daily figures on this page come from.