(CNN) — Striking images from the Sahara desert show large lakes carved into rolling sand dunes after one of the world’s driest and barren lands suffered its first flood in decades. There is.
It rains in the Sahara Desert, but it usually only falls a few centimeters a year, and rarely in late summer. However, after a low-pressure system passed over northwestern Sahara, heavy rain fell over parts of the desert in southeastern Morocco for two days in September.
Preliminary NASA satellite data shows nearly 8 inches of rain fell in parts of the region.
Errachidia, a desert city in southeastern Morocco, received nearly 3 inches of rain last month, most of it in just two days. This is more than four times the normal rainfall for the entire month of September, and more than half a year’s worth of rainfall for the region.
“It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short period of time,” Oussin Youabeb of Morocco’s Meteorological Agency told The Associated Press last week.
As the rain flowed across the desert terrain, a new water landscape was created among the palm trees and shrub plants.
Some of the most dramatic photos are from the desert town of Merzouga, where a rare flood created a new lake in the dunes.
The reflections of the town’s palm trees now sparkle in the expanse of a new lagoon surrounded by steep sand dunes.
The rain also filled normally dry lakes, including those in Iliki National Park, Morocco's largest national park. NASA satellite images from the region, using false colors to better emphasize flooding, show newly formed lakes in a swath of northwestern Sahara.
NASA’s false color satellite image shows parts of the Sahara Desert in Morocco and Algeria on August 14, 2024. The second image shows the same area on September 10, 2024, with the Iriki National Park lake shown in dark blue at the bottom. left.
Much of the rain fell in sparsely populated and remote areas, but some fell in Morocco’s towns and villages, causing deadly flooding last month that killed more than a dozen people.
The Sahara desert is the world’s largest non-polar desert, spanning 3.6 million square miles. Satellite images from September showed vast areas covered in green carpets as the storm moved further north than usual, with some studies blaming the phenomenon on human activity. It is linked to climate change.
More extreme rainfall events could occur in the Sahara desert in the future as fossil fuel pollution continues to heat the planet and disrupt the water cycle, according to a recent study.
CNN’s Brandon Miller contributed to this report.
