California's heavy rainfall this past winter may have ended the years-long drought, but it also brought back the long-dormant Tulare Lake. This lake, which occasionally resurfaces during years of unusually high precipitation, is larger than it's been in 150 years. The basin began to flood rapidly around March 12-14, when two major storms hit California. The flooding was so massive that NASA satellite images captured it from space.
Here's what the lakebed looked like on February 1, before the flooding, and what it looked like on April 30.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.
The Tulare lakebed, which is located in the southern San Joaquin Valley, happens to be set on the largest agricultural region in the entire state of California. NASA said the devastating flooding will likely continue into 2024. That means local farmers may not be able to plant new crops until 2025. That likely drop in supply has the potential to drive up food prices, particularly for produce.
Source: businessinsider.nl