As of early August 2008, the Oklahoma panhandle was experiencing its driest year (previous 365 days) since 1921, according to records kept by the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. Through July, year-to-date precipitation in Boise City, in the heart of Cimarron County, was only about 4.8 inches, barely half of average and drier than some years in the 1930s, the height of the Dust Bowl.
This pair of images from the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) shows the strip of flattened and possibly denuded vegetation left by the F4 tornado (winds from 207 to 260 miles per hour, causing “devastating damage”) that struck La Plata, Maryland on April 28, 2002.
In the arid terrain of the western slopes of the Andes Mountains in southern Peru, very little vegetation exists to soften or obscure the rugged topography. In the central part of the state of Ayacucho, pictured in this satellite image, the mountains are dramatically sliced by dozens of nearly straight, parallel canyons that point southwest toward the Pacific coast.