The General Directorate of Meteorology (DGM) announced, Wednesday, the publication of its annual report on the State of the Climate in Morocco for the year 2023. This report presents an overview of the evolution of the main climate indicators and provides a particular attention to extreme weather and climate phenomena with significant socio-economic impacts, underlines the General Directorate of Meteorology in a press release.
The management thus notes that the year 2023 was “the hottest ever recorded in Morocco since the beginning of the 20th century” with a national average temperature anomaly of 1.77 °C compared to the climatological normal of 1981-2010 .
Indeed, daily average temperatures were above normal for 79% of the days of the year, with the recording of a new absolute national record of 50.4°C in Agadir on Friday August 11, 2023, thus exceeding the symbolic bar of 50°C for the first time in Morocco. In terms of rainfall, 2023 was “the driest year in at least 80 years”, with a rainfall deficit of around 48%.
The 2022-2023 agricultural season was also severely dry, recording a rainfall deficit of 29.22% below normal, management said.
She also underlined that Morocco experienced more than twenty major weather phenomena in 2023. Among these events, a particularly notable spring heat wave which also affected a large part of southwest Europe and the northern Africa at the end of April 2023. Morocco is not a special case.
These worrying weather conditions are part of a global context marked by a continuous increase in the concentrations of greenhouse gases, which contributes significantly to global warming, according to explanations from the same source.
The year 2023 is also “the hottest ever recorded in the world”, with a global average temperature of around 1.45 ° C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), the management worries in its report annual.
The same report recalls, in this sense, the urgency of intensifying efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change and to better adapt to its inevitable impacts, indicating that the General Directorate of Meteorology reaffirms its commitment to providing quality climate information and services to different socio-economic sectors in order to support climate-resilient development, enable climate-related decision-making and raise public awareness of climate issues.
