As a child in Algeria in the late 1990s, Walid Ouaret remembers going to the mosque when the droughts became severe. There, he and his family would join their neighbors in a communal prayer for rain called Salat al-Istisqāʼ. It was not an informal event: the ceremony had been announced by the government.
“I wasn’t a farmer, but I had compassion for other people in my own community,” recalls Ouaret, who is now a PhD. candidate at the University of Maryland Study the intersections of climate and agriculture.
As he explored ways to improve the climate models he was using to understand the ramifications of climate change, Ouaret remembered the prayers about rain. Precipitation patterns are changing globally due to climate change, but data from places like Algeria may be scarce. He Salat al-Istisqā’On the other hand, it is expert throughout the Muslim world, spanning North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
“I was trying to find a substitute, something to tell me when food production or soil moisture in this region was affected. [scale].”
“I was trying to find a substitute, something to tell me when food production or soil moisture in this region was affected. [scale]He realized that the call to pray for rain could be a key piece of information that would reveal when droughts had become severe enough to warrant state-led interventions.
In most cases, the ceremony receives wide publicity, providing Ouaret with an easy way to track its prevalence over time.
A new type of climate data
For research that will be presented on December 18 at the AGU 2025 Annual MeetingOuaret and his co-authors reviewed media outlets, including newspapers and websites, in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia between 2000 and 2024, looking for Salat al-Istisqāʼ advertisements. They then calculated the probability that calls for prayers for rain corresponded to drought conditions, as measured by the Standardized evapotranspiration and precipitation index.
Ouaret found a strong correlation between Salat al-Istisqāʼ warnings and the severity of the six-month drought, validating the announcement of prayers for rain as an indicator of extreme weather. However, the environment was not the only relevant influence on calls to prayer. Ouaret said social unrest, measured by data on conflict events, was also associated with the announcement of prayers for rain. That confluence is a sign, he said, that calls to prayer can also function as a governance tool to increase social cohesion.
This type of data is valuable as it illuminates areas of the planet with less reliable climate monitoring networks, he said. Jen Shafferecological anthropologist also at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research.
“This kind of bottom-up view is really valuable for reaching areas where we don’t have weather stations.”
“People are getting signals of changes in the environment that are not easy to record with satellite data or with all of our instruments,” Shaffer said. “This kind of bottom-up view is really valuable for reaching areas where we don’t have weather stations.”
The Maghreb and other regions of Africa are vulnerable to that lack of data, but farming communities around the world are beset by climate-induced challenges.
Rituals calling for rain are common in cultures both past and present, from the kachina of pueblo cultures from the American Southwest to Catholics prayer for rain ceremonies practiced in Spain for Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas appointed by the state governor in 2011. These practices provide both a historical record of drought and a potential input to climate models.
Adding cultural events to climate models, which are typically fed by rigorously quantitative data, can be difficult, Shaffer said. But the Ouaret dataset benefits from the fact that an official, public announcement of prayers for rain can be linked to specific dates and locations.
In the future, Ouaret believes his work could provide a potential early warning system for drought vulnerability in specific communities, allowing more time to direct aid to where it is most needed. Data on the frequency of calls for prayers for rain could also be a useful tool for talking about climate change in affected communities, he said.
Communities “have been doing this in the past, but it used to happen every five years. Now it happens every year,” Ouaret said. Incorporating calls for prayers for rain into scientific models would be “validating [people’s] experience and tell them that it is scientifically valid.”
The work also aligns with another goal of Ouaret, which is to expand the reach of open science in North Africa and other places not prioritized by Western researchers.
“Empowering people to do science will go a long way toward bringing innovation to the entire community and providing a new way to address our traditional problems,” he said.
—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), scientific writer
Citation: Scharping, N. (2025), When a sentence is also a climatic signal, Éos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250450. Published on December 3, 2025.
Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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