Marrakech – A new peer-reviewed study finds that Morocco’s cities do not share a single urban heat pattern, and that some register cooler cores than their own outskirts. The research was published on September 1 in the journal Urban Science, tracking surface temperatures in five cities across the country’s climatic range from 1995 to 2024.
The authors, led by Adnane Labbaci, examined Tangier, Béni Mellal, Ifrane, Laayoune, and Taza. Each city represented a distinct environment, from the sub-humid coast of Tangier to the humid mountains of Ifrane and the hyper-arid south of Laayoune.
The team combined Landsat satellite data, ERA5-Land climate fields, vegetation indices, and MODIS land-cover records, processing everything through Google Earth Engine.
The central finding challenges the assumption that dense cities are always warmer than their surroundings. Researchers measured the difference between each urban core and a fixed peripheral zone six to seven kilometers away.
A positive value marks a surface urban heat island, while a negative value marks what the study calls an Urban Heat Sink, where bare, moisture-limited land on the edges heats more strongly than the built-up center.
Tangier was the only city with a clearly positive average contrast, at 4.6 degrees Celsius, and it recorded heat-sink conditions in just 3.0% of months. Its urban core stayed warmer than the periphery throughout the year, with the contrast peaking in April and May.
The authors attribute the northern city’s persistent warmth to its built-up core set against cooler surroundings shaped by maritime influence and vegetation. Unlike the isolated summer readings of earlier work, the monthly record shows this positive contrast holding across seasons and decades.
The study also found Tangier had the strongest link between urban land-cover fraction and heat-island intensity among the five cities, meaning denser development there tracked more closely with higher temperatures than elsewhere.
The other four cities showed negative averages: −1.4 degrees in Béni Mellal, −2.4 in Ifrane, −1.0 in Laayoune, and −0.7 in Taza. Ifrane stood out with heat-sink conditions in 90.5% of months and a single reading as low as −22.0 degrees.
These negative values do not mean the city centers are cold in absolute terms. Rather, the reference zones were warmer at the moment the satellite passed overhead. In Laayoune, hot desert surfaces drive that reversal, while in Ifrane and the inland cities, elevation, vegetation, and soil moisture shape the outer temperature.
Despite three decades of data, the study detected no statistically significant long-term trend in any city. Sen’s slope estimates ranged from −0.0012 to +0.0009 degrees per month, close to zero. The authors caution that this stability in relative contrast does not signal an absence of absolute warming or heat risk.
Turning to environmental drivers, the analysis found humidity had the strongest negative association with surface temperature in most cities, though the researchers note this may partly reflect shared seasonality rather than direct cause. Vegetation showed a weaker and more context-dependent effect.
The study also tested four forecasting models for short-term surface-temperature prediction. SARIMA performed best where seasonal cycles were regular, reaching R-squared values of 0.94 in Ifrane and 0.93 in Tangier.
Random Forest performed best in the more irregular signals of Taza and Laayoune, at 0.90 and 0.79. The forecasts predict surface temperature, not heat-island intensity, and carry wide uncertainty margins ranging from roughly 3.8 to 15.5 degrees.
The findings point to climate-specific planning rather than one national approach. Tangier would benefit from protecting vegetated corridors, while Laayoune’s hot desert edge means a cooler core should not be read as an absence of heat stress.
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