An extreme drought in northern Mexico’s Nuevo León state, near the US border, has brought the Cerro Prieto reservoir to the lowest point of its water capacity since it was built in 1980. NASA satellite images prove the magnitude of the drought.
The images show that water levels in Cerro Prieto have dropped so much in the last two years, “that water could no longer be extracted from the lake,” NASA said.
The images were taken in the second week of July 2022, when a heat wave raised temperatures in Monterrey to around 40 degrees Celsius, according to NASA.
At that time, the reservoir’s capacity was reduced to just 0.5% of the total 393 million cubic meters of water.
The images were taken by Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager (OLI). 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 ensure residential supplies.
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 officials point to previous administrations, the private sector blames excessive population growth.
“At the end of June 2022, two-thirds of Mexico was in drought conditions, affecting more than 21 million people. Northern states along the US border were the most affected. Nearly a quarter of the state of Chihuahua and a third of the state of Coahuila was in exceptional or extreme drought,” said the NASA Observatory on the drought situation in Mexico.
The drought also affected parts of the United States. NASA last week released satellite images of the largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, which provides 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 predicted to be one of the most extreme water shortage sources in the Southwest starting next year.
Source: CNN Brasil
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