(Reporter) Well it's been a tale of two extremes this year for the United States.
Severe drought has plagued places in the west coast, like California.
Also Texas has seen severe drought, but
recently southern California and Texas got rain. Does that mean
those droughts are over? Here to tell use more is Dr. Ben Cook
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, thanks for joining us. (Cook) Thanks for having me.
(Reporter) So its been a year of extreme weather in the United States. What are the NASA
satellites showing us? (Cook) Well NASA has a fleet of twenty Earth Observing Satellites
constantly taking measurements of the land surface, the oceans and the atmospheres and
one of our most recent satellites is the Global Precipitation Measuring Mission launched in
2014 and what it's been able to show is really the extreme nature of
rainfall over this last year over North America. In the image here we are looking at
accumulated precipitation from January through June of this year. What you can see is the
exceptional wetness in the eastern half of the United States.
Including record rainfall and record droughts in Texas contrasting with west
which has received very little rainfall constant with the ongoing droughts there.
(Reporter) In the last couple of months, Texas and Southern California both experienced
heavy rain after years of drought, does that mean those droughts are now over?
(Cook) In the case of Texas by any indicator the drought is over
but the thing to remember is that in Texas it was a multi-year long drought
that really took an extreme, in fact wettest May on record to wipe it out
in a single month. In the case of California, the news is maybe not so good.
Hurricane Delores is only a drop in the bucket of the total amount
water that has been lost, as shown here in the great satellite which measures
total changes in ground water, surface water and
snow cover. So in California we can expect to seethe drought continuing
for at least another year and maybe some improvement this fall.
(Reporter) Strong El-Nino in the Pacific ocean, what impact
could that have? (Cook) Right now a moderate to strong is developing
which means warm water is piling up in the eastern tropical Pacific
and when this happens the jet streams over North America and many other parts of the globe
get shifted. In the case of North America what that means, we can expect more
winter storms come into Southern California and the south west and Texas
so its very likely or hopeful that we'll see some drought improvement
in those areas. Unfortunately with El-Nino there's winners and losers and so other
places like the Amazon and Indonesia can expect much drier
conditions this coming year and potentially big fires.
(Reporter) Can we expect these types of extreme events in the future?
(Cook) As we start to warm the planet we can expect the hydraulic cycle
basically get super charged which means that both the
dry and wet extremes are going to get more intense and more frequent. Over North America
what we are seeing of all our state of the art model projections
is the tendency towards increase drought in the future as precipetation patterns
and as warming up the atmosphere
starts to dry out the soils. Fore sure for most of western
America expect to see a steady trend towards to drier and drier conditions
(Reporter) And where can we learn more? (Cook) nasa.gov/earth
(Reporter) Thank you so much for joining us. (Cook) Thank You.