Harmful Algal Blooms in California’s Pyramid Lake

  • Released Wednesday, May 6, 2026
View full credits

Green algae swirls across the blue waters of Nevada’s Pyramid Lake. This time series of Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) imagery from August 28 to November 6, 2024 shows the explosive growth and decline of these blooms, which form when a flood of nutrients meets warm water and abundant sunlight. Under these conditions, toxic cyanobacteria can multiply rapidly, releasing liver-damaging toxins that threaten public health. Though HLS cannot detect if a bloom is harmful from space, the imagery can provide an early warning system for local water managers for new algal growth.

A natural-color HLS time series of Pyramid Lake's algal bloom formation, spanning from August 28 to November 6, 2024, documenting the development, peak intensity, and decline of the bloom across the water.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Missions

This page is related to the following missions:

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Wednesday, May 6, 2026.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 4:05 PM EDT.