geography
In September 2024, an extratropical storm dumped nearly a year's worth of rain on parts of the Sahara Desert in just two days.
The rare deluge caused dry lakebeds to refill and vegetation to sprout, turning parts of the desert visibly green in places that hadn't seen such growth in decades. Satellite images showed long-empty basins like Morocco's Lake Iriqui filling with water, while shrubs and grasses quickly took advantage of the sudden moisture to sprout across the landscape.
The rainfall clearly did not evaporate instantly without a trace, since satellites captured real, lasting changes on the ground, and the desert was not permanently converted into grassland either, since scientists stress that such rare storms don't transform the Sahara's climate on their own.
A follow-up modeling study in 2025 suggested that as the climate keeps warming, similar rare rain events might become somewhat more common, potentially pushing monsoon patterns farther into the Sahara over the long term.
geography
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