English: September 26, 2023 June 3, 2023

Sitting in the rich agricultural basin of California’s San Joaquin Valley, Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. When rainfall and snowmelt flowed down from the Sierra Nevada mountains, the lake would grow and in dry weather, water levels would drop. Since the 1920s, the rivers that feed Tulare Lake have been dammed and the water diverted for agriculture and other uses. Since then, the lake disappeared, and the lakebed was converted to agricultural use.

After a remarkably wet winter and spring, spurred by a series of atmospheric rivers from late 2022-spring 2023, Tulare Lake once again sprang to life. As of May 8, 2023, there were 103,000 acres of land in Tulare Lake under water and that expanded to 114,000 acres in early June, before water began to slowly recede. The rising waters threatened the town of Cocoran, home to more than 20,000 residents and about 8,000 inmates in two prisons. Raising the town’s 14.5-mile-long levee, along with other diversion measurements enacted by the state, helped limit maximum flooding and kept the town dry.

By late September 2023, the water in Tulare Lake had begun to recede, thanks to natural evaporation and community action. According to a flood update by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) published in September, the state’s response and recovery efforts included raising local roadways for rural communities and expediting water dispersal by moving water from Tulare Lake to nearby farmlands within Kings County.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a false-color image of Tulare Lake on September 26. In this type of image, water appears deep blue, while open land is tan, and vegetation looks bright green. Widespread flooding is evident in this image.

To appreciate the reduction in inundation, the September 26 image can be compared to an Aqua MODIS image acquired of the same area on June 3, 2023, simply by clicking on that date. Toggling back and forth between the two shows the substantial reduction in size of Tulare Lake in almost 4 months.