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Drought in Nuevo León, Mexico: these NASA images show the magnitude of the crisis

2022-07-25T08:49:00.668Z


NASA satellite images show the extreme drought in Nuevo León, which has caused the Cerro Prieto reservoir to reach the lowest point of its water capacity since it was built in 1980.


Why is there no water in the Mexican state of Nuevo León?

5:22

(CNN Spanish) --

An extreme drought in the north of the State of Nuevo León, Mexico, near the United States border, has caused the Cerro Prieto reservoir to reach the lowest point of its water capacity since it was built in 1980. NASA satellite images are evidence of the magnitude of the drought.

The images show that water levels in Cerro Prieto fell so much in the last two years, "that water could no longer be extracted from the lake," NASA said.

The images were taken the second week of July 2022, when a heat wave shot temperatures in Monterrey to around 40ºC, according to NASA.

By that time, the reservoir's capacity was reduced to only 0.5% of its capacity of 393 million cubic meters of water.

The images were obtained by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. The first shows the Cerro Prieto reservoir on July 20, 2015, on the left, and the other, the reservoir on July 7, 2022, on the right. .


In response, Mexico's National Water Commission, Conagua, announced emergency measures that included the redirection of some industrial and agricultural water allocations to guarantee residential supply.

The shortage of drinking water in Nuevo León and, particularly, in the metropolitan area of ​​Monterrey, has caused a crisis in the population for which neither the current government nor the businessmen assume responsibility.

While government authorities point to previous administrations, the private sector blames the excessive population growth.

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  • NASA releases new satellite images of Lake Mead, showing it has lost vast amounts of water since 2000

"As of the end of June 2022, two-thirds of Mexico was in drought conditions, affecting more than 21 million people. The northern states along the border with the United States were the most affected. Nearly a quarter of the state of Chihuahua and a third of the state of Coahuila were in exceptional or extreme drought," said the NASA Observatory on the drought situation in Mexico.

The drought has also affected parts of the United States.

NASA last week released satellite images of the largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, which supplies water to millions of people in seven states, tribal lands and northern Mexico, affected by a severe drought.

Lake Mead, located in Nevada and Arizona, is forecast to be one of the sources of more extreme water outages in the Southwest beginning next year.

Drought

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-07-25

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