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Update: Satellite Photos Reveal Flood's Impact on Rural Areas

This article is more than 10 years old.

Computer simulation of the Aqua satellite (Image via Wikipedia)

Update: An estimated three million acres of land in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee have been flooded, devastating farms there and causing $500 million in damage. Crops most affected include wheat, corn, soybeans and rice.

"There is no way to overstate the impact of this to those affected," says Warren Carter, director of commodity and regulatory affairs for the Arkansas Farm Bureau. "It has been devastating."

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Although most news stories emphasize the impact of flooding on cities along the Mississippi, the real disaster areas are in rural areas, as images from NASA’s Aqua satellite show.

The pictures below use infrared and visible light to increase the contrast between land (brown for soil, green for plants) and water (shades of blue).

Although the Mississippi is swollen, you can see from the images that the most severe flooding is occurring about a dozen miles from the cities along the Mississippi River.

The larger problems in the middle South are from tributaries overflowing their banks.

The picture immediately below was taken on April 29.

While the Mississippi River is high, low-lying rural lands nearby appear nearly normal.

Until...

In the picture above, taken on Tuesday, it's clear that the land surrounding tributaries of the Mississippi is getting hit hardest. (What look like lakes in the areas east of Harrisburg, Arkansas, and west of Helena are actually flooded fields.)

Flooding is more extensive in rural areas partly due to the system of levees built to protect cities. But there's a more important reason. The volume of water pouring down the Mississippi is preventing tributaries from releasing water into the larger river. That water is actually backing up along the tributaries and, eventually, spilling over the banks and flooding rural areas.

The Mississippi crested at 47.8 feet in Memphis on Tuesday. More serious problems may be in store for New Orleans and surrounding areas as flood waters head south.