🇪🇭Western Sahara

Western Sahara extends from 20°46′ to 27°40′N as a sparsely populated 266,000 km² disputed territory on the northwest African coast, bordered by Morocco to the north, Algeria to the northeast, Mauritania to the east and south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west.

The landscape is predominantly a low rolling plateau of stony hammada at 200 to 300 m elevation, featuring the Dakhla and Río de Oro coastal embayments and rising to approximately 500 m on the Adrar Sutuf escarpment. The climate is overwhelmingly hot arid BWh with a small hot semi-arid BSh fringe in the north toward Cape Bojador. Importantly, a cool Atlantic coastal strip is moderated by the cold Canary Current, which produces a paradoxically mild thermal regime along the seaboard.

Laayoune, also known as El Aaiún, averages 17°C in January and 25°C in August—strikingly mild for a Saharan city—with only 50 mm of rainfall concentrated in the rare September to March wet season. Dakhla, situated on a long peninsula, is cooler still at 18°C in January and 24°C in August under steady northwest trade winds and persistent summer fog driven by Canary Current upwelling.

Inland at the Adrar Sutuf and the Tindouf-fringe regions, summer maxima exceed 45°C while winter cool nights drop below 5°C. The territory occasionally experiences severe flash floods when rare Atlantic depressions reach the desert, such as the 2014 Smara floods. The harmattan dust season from December to March brings poor visibility. Multi-decade drought has shrunk the few oases. Sea-level rise and Atlantic-storm intensification threaten Dakhla and the phosphate-export coast. The pelagic fishery is climate-sensitive to Canary Current shifts.

Our archive covers 2 Sahrawi cities with daily ERA5 reanalysis data going back to 1940. The warmest July averages occur in Laayoune, around 26.9°C, while Laayoune records the coldest January nights near 12.3°C. Comparing the last decade against the 1940–1970 baseline, mean temperatures across these cities have risen by about 0.6°C.