Parts of U.S. farmland pulverized by severe storms visible from space
Severe thunderstorms cause an average of $9 billion of damage per year in the United States.
By Dean Murray via SWNS
An image shows huge swaths of farmland pulverized after multiple severe thunderstorms have battered the Midwest this summer.
In a satellite image, revealed on Wednesday, Aug, 23, formerly green vegetation is seen as brown after being battered by the elements.
The storms’ violent bursts of wind and hail often pummel crops, leaving long swaths of damaged vegetation across the U.S. Midwest and the Great Plains that are easily visible from space.
The Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on NASA's Landsat 9 observation satellite captured a detailed view of one of the land scars near Garden City, Kansas, on July 23.
The image marks the announcement of a new database detailing two decades of damaged swaths left after winds and hail damaged crops and vegetation.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and The University of Alabama in Huntsville identified more than 1,600 hail and wind damage swaths between 2000-2020.
The results of their analysis were published in Weather Forecasting in June 2023. Though similar databases already exist for tornado damage, this is the first comprehensive database of this type of damage.
“We hope that by taking the first step and better identifying the spatial and temporal trends of these events, stakeholders—especially farmers and the insurance and reinsurance sectors—will be able to better evaluate and mitigate hail and wind risks,” says Emily Wisinski of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
NASA explains: "Since hail is such a frequent and widespread phenomenon, these damage swaths represent a costly problem.
"According to NOAA’s list of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, severe thunderstorms cause an average of $9 billion of damage per year in the United States, making them more costly than floods, droughts, wildfires, and winter storms.
"Between January and June 2023, 13 of the 15 billion-dollar disasters listed were caused by severe thunderstorms, including several wind and hail events."
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