Assessments on Impacted Croplands from Extreme Weather Events (2023-2024)

Disasters caused by extreme weather events impact the agricultural industry in terms of effects on local farming communities, expected crop yields, and food security on a broader scale. Consequently, the United States Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA-NASS) monitors disasters and provides quantitative assessments of potential effects to agriculture. Since 2017, NASS has provided such assessments to its stakeholders (USDA agencies and other federal agencies) and the public for decision support. Studies are conducted by analyzing and estimating potentially impacted croplands due to natural disaster events such as hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, derechos, and floods due to excessive rainfall using remotely sensed and other geographic data sources. Products are internally reviewed and published on the NASS Disaster Analysis page - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Disaster-Analysis. A sample of disaster assessments from 2023-2024 are presented illustrating crop impact studies conducted by NASS. The first assessment identified inundated croplands after heavy rainfall occurred across northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota, and southeast South Dakota in late June 2024 resulting in widespread and record flooding in the region. Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar and Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) imagery were analyzed, in combination with NASS’s Cropland Data Layer (CDL), to estimate acreage by crop type affected by the floods. The second study highlights agriculture impacted from multiple wildfires that occurred in northern Texas from late February through mid-March 2024. Among these wildfires was the Smokehouse Creek wildfire, the largest in Texas history with over one million acres of land burned. NASS identified affected landcover using fire perimeter extents from the National Interagency Fire Center, pre- and post-event Sentinel-2 to derive Color Infrared images to assess vegetation health, and Normalized Burn Ratio calculations to evaluate burn extent and severity. Scorched areas were then compared to NASS’s CDL to identify types of crop fields and acreage impacted. Sampled burned areas were visually confirmed using Sentinel-2 MSI and WorldView-3, WorldView-2, and GeoEye-1 high resolution imagery. Additional crop impact studies conducted by NASS on the extent of damage to agricultural land and activities from other natural disaster events are also presented including the 2023 Maui Wildfires project. This latter study revealed the need for more current and granular cropland mapping in the State of Hawaii, leading to a joint research effort (AgriWatch) between USDA, University of Hawaii-Manoa, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Colorado State University to create high-resolution crop data layers for 2023 and 2024 and high spatio-temporal resolution fire and vegetation condition map products using machine learning and deep learning methods.