Landsat images reveal Texas drought and Thailand floods in 2026

Two ends of the planet, the same month, the same satellite in orbit. In September 2026 the instruments aboard the Landsat satellites captured two opposite scenarios that reveal Texas and Thailand at water extremes. The satellites are jointly managed by NASA and USGS. The images showed the dead cotton of western Texas and the flooded fields of Thailand. The two images tell the same water imbalance, with opposite signs: where water is entirely absent and where too much arrives all at once. In both cases photography from space has become a measuring tool for farmers and relief workers. On the ground, the affected areas are hard even to cross.

Landsat images reveal Texas cotton dying with no fallback

The High Plains of Texas are the largest cotton-producing region in the United States. The 2026 drought has surpassed the memory of the eldest farmers. Past dry seasons had already forced the abandonment of enormous portions of the non-irrigated harvest. The share was 72 percent in 2022 and 66 percent in 2011. But in 2026 something changed. Lacy Cotter-Vardeman is a farmer in Lubbock County, where her family has worked the land for generations. She recounted that for the first time the cotton died completely. Her insurers had never seen anything like it: about 90 percent of her dryland cotton is dead.

The satellite image of September 9, 2026, taken by the Operational Land Imager aboard Landsat 8, shows brown fields and empty plots. A year earlier, on September 22, 2025, the same area looked far greener. Among the most telling details are the green semicircles. Many farmers find less and less water in the aquifer. For this reason they irrigate only half or a third of their circular fields. The green semicircles in the fields mark the water shortage.

Where the underground water goes

The bottom of the Texas story is not the sky, but the High Plains aquifer. According to U.S. Geological Survey data, the water level across much of Lubbock County has dropped by 25 to 100 feet since 1950. That year large-scale extraction began to irrigate the land. In the more northern counties, such as Parmer and Castro, declines have exceeded 150 feet. In the summer of 2026 many wells began to “pump air”. Cotter-Vardeman saw many of her wells stop working in August. Conservationist Tillery Timmons-Sims owns land in Brownfield. She said that many farmers expected the water to run out for the next generation. The depletion is happening now.

Scattered across the landscape are more than 19,300 ephemeral lakes called playas, mostly small, less than 30 acres. The playa lakes of Texas are lined with clay: when they function, they collect rainwater and let it filter down toward the aquifer, the region’s primary source of irrigation. But about 80 percent have been altered by plowing or buried by sediment, and many no longer filter anything. In September 2026 most were dry, unlike the previous year. Without functioning playas the aquifer gets no recharge.

The monsoon that will not stop

If Texas shows the dry end of the same imbalance, Thailand shows the opposite end. September is the heart of the monsoon season, and afternoon rains are normal. But between late September and early October 2026 persistent rains, punctuated by torrential downpours, kept the low-lying areas of the whole country underwater. A low-pressure system stalled for days over the region, fed by the moisture of the hot Gulf of Thailand. In Bangkok nearly 300 millimeters of rain fell in 48 hours. The city lies about 100 kilometers west of Prachin Buri province. According to reports, the value is close to the September monthly average of 344 millimeters.

The false-color Landsat images of October 2 show the Bang Pakong river and the farmland and fish farms submerged. The bright red shapes are floating solar installations. Since mid-September the flood has hit 50 provinces. According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, more than 4 million people have been affected by the flood, with dozens of deaths. Government agencies estimate about 270,000 hectares of farmland damaged, including rice paddies and orchards, according to The Nation.

Looking from above to decide down below

The thread that ties the two stories runs through the science of Earth observations. The playa lakes of Lubbock were among the first subjects studied after the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. An early analysis by a Texas Tech geoscientist estimated a very low cost. Monitoring them from space would cost a fraction of ground surveys. More recently, a team from the same university used a deep learning system to track thousands of playas over three decades. The results, published in September 2026, show that since 1995 the playas have been declining in 15 of the 45 counties analyzed.

Meanwhile the network connecting satellites and fields is expanding. Timmons-Sims stopped farming in 2007, precisely because of the aquifer’s decline. Today she leads the Sandhills Area Research Association. It collaborates with NASA Acres, a consortium that brings NASA science to farmers. In August a listening tour stopped at several locations. Among them Cotter-Vardeman’s farm in Slaton, a vineyard in Meadow and the parched cotton fields of Kress. At every stop the conversation returned to water: how to preserve the aquifer and return billions of gallons to it. In Texas the goal is to help farmers decide what and when to plant, how to manage irrigation and sediment. In flooded Thailand the same observations serve to assess the damage. In Texas the rains of September and October, helped by a strong El Niño in the Pacific, are not enough. According to Jonathan Case, a meteorologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center and author of the Drought Monitor, more than 7 inches of rain over three months are needed. Only then can the drought end. Time, like the aquifer, is running out.

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