Flora tends to sprout quickly once the typically dry landscape gets water.
One of the driest regions on earth is shifting green, as an influx of heavy rainfall causes vegetation to grow in the typically barren landscape.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra satellite captured this false-color image of the resulting runoff and floodwater on September 10, 2024.The plants include shrubs and trees in low-lying areas, like riverbeds, Sylwia Trzaska, a climate variability researcher at the Columbia Climate School, told ABC News.
"It looks like a desert, and then when the rain comes, then everything starts greening very quickly," Trzaska said.In addition, lakes that are typically empty are filling up due to the most recent event, Moshe Armon, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Earth Sciences and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a statement released by NASA.
The northward displacement of the storm track helped a developing system dump a year's worth of rainfall in some areas in just a matter of days, according to NASA. The system formed over the Atlantic Ocean and extended far southward, pulling moisture from equatorial Africa into the northern Sahara, according to NASA.
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