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].”
“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.
Ouaret found a strong correlation between Salat al-Istisqāʼ notices and 6-month drought severity, which validated the announcement of rain prayers as a proxy for extreme weather. The environment wasn’t the only relevant influence on the calls to prayer, however. Ouaret said social unrest, as measured by conflict event data, was also associated with the announcement of rain prayers. That confluence is a sign, he said, that calls to prayer may also function as a governance tool for increasing social cohesion.
These kinds of data are valuable, as they illuminate areas of the planet with fewer reliable climate monitoring networks, said Jen Shaffer, an ecological anthropologist also at the University of Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
“This sort of grassroots, bottom-up view is really valuable to get at areas where we don’t have weather stations.”
“People are getting signals of change going on in the environment that’s not easy to record with satellite data, or with all of our instruments,” Shaffer said. “This sort of grassroots, bottom-up view is really valuable to get at areas where we don’t have weather stations.”
The Maghreb and other regions of Africa are vulnerable to such lack of data, but agricultural communities around the world are beset by climate-induced challenges.
Rituals that ask for rain are common in cultures both past and present, from the kachina of the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest to Catholic pro pluvia rogation ceremonies practiced in Spain to Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas designated by the state’s governor in 2011. These practices offer both a historical record of drought and a potential input for climate models.
Adding cultural events to climate models, which are normally fed rigorously quantitative data, can be difficult, Shaffer noted. But Ouaret’s dataset benefits from the fact that a public, official announcement of rain prayers can be tied 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 marshal aid to where it’s needed most. Data on the frequency of calls for rain prayers could also be a helpful tool for talking about climate change in affected communities, he said.
Communities “have been doing this in the past, but it was happening like once every 5 years. Now it’s happening every year,” Ouaret said. Incorporating calls for rain prayers into scientific models would be “validating [people’s] experience and telling them that it’s scientifically valid.”
The work also aligns with another goal for Ouaret, which is expanding the reach of open science in North Africa and other places underprioritized by Western researchers.
“Empowering people to do their science will help them so much to bring innovation to the whole community and bring a new way of addressing our traditional problems,” he said.
—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer
Citation: Scharping, N. (2025), When a prayer is also a climate signal,
Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250450. Published on 3 December 2025.
Text © 2025. The authors.
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
