Bouchra159/morocco-water-stress

Mapping Morocco’s water crisis with open data — measuring the Al Massira reservoir’s 91% collapse from Sentinel-2, with QGIS maps and a community-conservation StoryMap # Running Dry: mapping water stress in Morocco I am from the south of Morocco, where the water is running out and people are leaving. I grew up hearing that things used to be different, that there used to be farming here. I wanted to know whether that was true or whether it was just the kind of thing people say about the past. So I learned to measure it. This is what I found, built entirely from free satellite data. Every number comes from a script in `src/`, so anyone can run it and check me. ## Morocco has less water than it used to, but not for the reason I expected In 1961 there were about 2,431 cubic metres of renewable freshwater per person here. By 2022 there were 777. That is a 68% drop, and it puts Morocco below the line hydrologists use to define water stress. But the water did not disappear. The total has stayed roughly flat, around 29 billion cubic metres a year. What changed is that the population tripled, from 12 million to 38 million. And 88% of the water that gets used goes to farming. So this is not really a story about rain. It is a story about how many of us there are, and what we choose to grow. ## I measured one reservoir from space The Al Massira dam holds the water Casablanca drinks. I wanted to watch it change, so I measured its surface from Sentinel-2 images every dry season from 2017 to 2026, using a water index and an automatic threshold, with clouds masked out. It fell from 98 square kilometres to 9. That is a 91% collapse. Then in 2026 it came back to 125, bigger than when I started, after the record rains of 2025 and 2026 refilled Morocco's dams. I had already written "the vanishing reservoir" before I extended the data to 2026. I was wrong. The real story is not that the water is disappearing, it is that it swings violently between drought and flood. That is harder to live with than a slow decline, because you cannot plan around it. The cyan line below is the 2017 shoreline. The blue is what was left in 2024. Everyth …