🇪🇭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, featuring the Río de Oro bay at Dakhla and rising to small mountains in the east. The climate is overwhelmingly hot arid BWh. 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, sees January highs of 23°C with nights of 12°C and August highs of 31°C, 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 in summer, with January highs of 22°C and nights of 14°C and August highs of 26°C, with occasional fog from the cool offshore current.

Inland at the Adrar Sutuf and the Tindouf-fringe regions, summer maxima can exceed 45°C while winter nights are much cooler. The territory occasionally experiences severe flash floods when rare Atlantic depressions reach the desert. The pelagic fishery depends on the productive Canary Current system.

Our archive covers 2 Sahrawi cities with daily ERA5 reanalysis data going back to 1940. Comparing the last decade against the 1940–1970 baseline, mean temperatures across these cities have risen by about 0.6°C.