The United States has been divided into regions that are either drying up or getting wetter, as seen in data provided by NASA satellites.
One region shows drought in California, while the other shows flooding in Texas.
In the Midwest, rainfall can be measured up to as much as six inches. According to a NASA scientist, more changes can be seen when El Niño takes hold in the Pacific. In California and the southwest U.S., there could also be more rainfall because of the large and recurring band of El Niño's warm waters, which strengthens and develops in the east Pacific.
When warm waters are stored off in the east of South America, the fast flying current of air known as the jet stream moves up north then causes rain to fall in the southwest and west coasts of the U.S. As a result, Indonesia and other parts of the Earth will in contrast experience less rainfall, explained Doug Morton, a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center physical scientist.
Drought and rainfall were seen and further predicted to occur in certain regions of the U.S. through the satellites set up by NASA to monitor the planet's cloud cover, ground water and precipitation processes. In 2014, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite was added to the agency's 20 existing Earth-orbiting satellites that provide statistics on precipitation. The GPM is the first satellite to cover a planet-wide scope of rainfall and snowfall as frequent as every three hours.
"That's been providing an unprecedented look at the way in which rainfall has given us a tale of two countries this year," said Morton, who added that the data derived from GPM could be combined with other data and measurements, such as those taken by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite.
The GRACE satellite is a pair of satellites whose distance changes while orbiting the Earh due to changes in the density of gravity below. In a local area, gravity is increased by water. With this, the GRACE satellite is able to measure rainfall across the planet.
"As a scientist, I'm using that information to understand the long-term memory of rain in the soil that allows us to look at the ways in which drought conditions are predisposed in some regions, like California or the southern Amazon, to stronger and longer fire seasons," Morton added.
