Interagency collaboration supported rapid response efforts.

Periods of heavy rainfall caused extensive flooding across much of the Midwestern United States and Mississippi River Basin in spring 2017, including widespread accumulation of 7–10 inches of rain, flash floods, and long-term river flooding. In response, NASA’s Earth Science Disasters Program assembled a team of scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, other NASA centers, and NASA-affiliated partners to assist the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. National...

In 2015, drought impacts in the Western United States cost an estimated $4.5 billion. Impacts included the fallowing of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland, excess groundwater pumping, and the exacerbation of wildfire conditions, which contributed to fires that caused the highest annual total of U.S. acreage burned since record-keeping began in 1960. As these impacts become more prevalent under a...

Since 2014, Jamaica has experienced one of its worst droughts in a decade, and the fourth worst on record since the 1970s. The drought has profoundly affected the agricultural sector: agricultural production fell by roughly 50% between 2013 and 2014. In response, Jamaica's Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) and the...