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EN_01160538_3549
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Southeastern and eastern Brazil is three years into one of its worst droughts in a century. The region is already 100 to 200 millimeters (4 to 8 inches) below normal rainfall for the calendar year, following 400 millimeter deficits for 2014. And the rainy season (November through March) has not brought the drought relief that citizens and civic leaders were hoping for. The Cantareira reservoir system, which supplies water to half of the people in São Paulo, is at roughly 10 percent of capacity, according to news reports. That is up from 5 percent in October, just before the rainy season began. The depleted drinking water supply has been attributed by news and advocacy sources to a combination of unusual weather conditions and uneven resource management. Some scientists assert that deforestation has played a role in changing weather patterns and water storage. The Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite captured these views of the Jaguari Reservoir, part of the Cantareira System. The top image was acquired on February 11, 2015; the middle image is from October 22, 2014, near the end of the dry season; and the third image shows conditions a year ago, on February 8, 2014. Note how the light-colored "bath-tub ring" of lake-bottom sediments grows around the water edges, how new islands emerge, and how some basins are devoid of water by 2015. "The drought most definitely continues, and the images of the reservoir levels tells the story very well," said Michael Coe, a scientist from the Woods Hole Research Center who studies land and water issues in the Amazon. "The fact that the reservoir is lower in February 2015 - the height of the wet season - than in October 2014 - the end of the dry season - tells us that there clearly is no recharge occurring. In other words, whatever rain has occurred during the wet season hasn't been enough to produce significant runoff and fill the reservoirs." Though the water levels continue to drop, the landscape itself gives
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arch16
1902-01-01
NASA/Sipa USA/East News
Sipa USA
Sipa USA
sipausa_14961805
2,09MB
17cm x 17cm by 300dpi
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