Featured in Eos: PhD Candidate Connects Rain Prayers and Climate Signals
Ahead of the AGU Annual Meeting, Eos magazine highlights UMD PhD candidate Walid Ouaret’s work showing how state-announced rain prayers in North Africa can serve as a reliable marker of drought severity.
As a child in Algeria in the late 1990s, Walid Ouaret remembers going to the mosque when droughts turned severe. There, he and his family would join their neighbors in a communal prayer for rain called the Salat al-Istisqāʼ. It was no informal event: The ceremony had been announced by the government.
“I was not a farmer, but I was feeling for other people from my own community,” remembered Ouaret, who’s now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland studying 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 rain prayers. Rainfall patterns are changing globally due to climate change, but data from places like Algeria can be sparse. The Salat al-Istisqāʼ, on the other hand, is practiced across the Muslim world, which spans northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
“I was trying to find a proxy, something that would tell me when food production was impacted or soil moisture was impacted at this regional [scale],” he said. The call for rain prayers, he realized, could be a key data point revealing when droughts had become sufficiently severe to warrant state-led interventions.
In most instances, the ceremony is widely advertised, giving Ouaret a simple way of tracking its prevalence over time.
A New Kind of Climate Data
For research that will be presented on 18 December at AGU’s Annual Meeting 2025, Ouaret and his coauthors combed through mass media, including newspapers and websites, from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from 2000 to 2024, looking for announcements of Salat al-Istisqāʼ. Then, they calculated how likely the calls for rain prayers were to correspond to drought conditions, as measured by the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index.
This story was written by Nathaniel Scharping for Eos, AGU's science news magazine.
Published on Mon, 12/08/2025 - 10:11