Plagued by extensive flooding along the Danube in 2006, Romania and Bulgaria faced drought in 2007. Poor winter snow and little spring rain left more than half of Romania in drought. As much as 1.7 million hectares of cereal crops have been destroyed because of the drought, said World Vision, quoting a Romanian News Agency.
This image shows the impact of the drought on vegetation along the Danube in southern Romania and northern Bulgaria as observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite between May 9 and May 24, 2007. The image is a vegetation anomaly image, which compares the density or lushness of vegetation in 2007 to average conditions observed between 2000 and 2006. Areas in which vegetation is sparser than average are brown, and regions in which plants are growing better than average are green. Average conditions are represented by cream, and areas where there are no data, usually because of persistent cloud cover, are grey.
In this image, the Danube flows through a wide valley bounded by the Transylvanian Alps on the north and the Balkan Mountains on the south. The valley is largely brown, indicating poor vegetation growth. In the large image, tiny green and cream squares interrupt the brown where fields have been irrigated. The large image also shows that the drought extends into northeastern Romania. The encircling mountains are defined by an arch of green on the north and south sides of the valley.
A month after the data used to make this image were acquired, Romania’s drought worsened with the onset of a heat wave. By June 26, the heat had killed 23 people in Romania and set the country on high alert for fires in the dry vegetation, reported the Associated Press. By that point, the drought had become Romania’s most severe since 1945.
References & Resources
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of Inbal Reshef, Global Agricultural Monitoring Project.
