Some recent satellite imagery from NASA shows the drought impacts on agriculture and the environment in the Sacramento Valley. The following images compare the summer of 2011 (a wet year) versus the summer of 2014 (the third year of drought) in the Central Valley. The green is land with water and the red is generally idled land without water. In the Sacramento Valley–the northern third of the Great Central Valley–you can see significant red around the outside of the Valley and sprinkled throughout the interior part of the Sacramento Valley. The red is farmland, wildlife management areas and other managed wetlands that were not irrigated last year. The pervasiveness of the red areas reveals both the economic and environmental impact to the region, including the communities that depend upon these lands being irrigated. It appears that the summer of 2015 will have less water in many parts of the Sacramento Valley, which will surely lead to a summer 2015 image with even more red.
These images are on page 75 of the recent Department of Water Resources report: California’s Most Significant Droughts: Comparing Historical and Recent Conditions.
