After a slow-moving weather system swamped the Midwest U.S. in early April 2025, many rivers’ water levels soared to near-historic levels. Arkansas was particularly hard hit, with floodwaters spilling across rural landscapes in the Arkansas Delta, a region where commodity crops such as rice, corn, soybeans, and wheat are widely grown. Many farmers still faced high water levels more than a month after the flooding began.
“This is one of the largest, most dramatic, and long-lasting agricultural floods we’ve seen in Arkansas in decades,” said Jason Davis, a remote sensing expert with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service, noting that the April 2025 flood exceeded the severity of floods in the state in 2018, 2019, and 2023.
The OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 captured this false-color image (right) showing flooding along the borders of Craighead and Jackson counties in northeastern Arkansas on April 13. For comparison, the other image shows the same area on April 17, 2023, when water levels were much lower. The images combine shortwave infrared, near infrared, and red light (bands 6-5-4) to make it easier to distinguish water (blue) from land (brown) and vegetation (green).
The Cache River crested at Egypt on April 10, but floodwaters lingered as water from upstream worked its way through the watershed, breaching a key levee and pooling in areas that drain poorly. Joe Christian, a rice and soybean farmer with fields along the Cache, chronicled the state of his farm as floodwaters overwhelmed it.
Posts on X showed an aerial photo of his flooded storage shed, young plants that were submerged for days (above), and muddy rows that he simply describes as “toast.”
In the Landsat imagery, notice how the river widens a few kilometers upstream of Grubbs. “That’s the line where ‘channelizing’ and ‘dredging’ of the river stopped in the 1970s,” Christian said in an interview with NASA Earth Observatory. “North of Grubbs, we get floods almost every year now.”
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station also captured several photos (available here) showing the scope of flooding in Arkansas. The photo below shows flooding along the White River in Jackson County near the towns of Newport and Bradford on April 15.
Many Arkansas farmers got an early start on planting this spring, thinking it would lead to bumper harvests in the fall, explained Jarrod Hardke, a rice agronomist for the extension service. Instead, many farmers will likely muddle through a season that brings lower than usual yields, he said.
Rice is more flood-tolerant than corn or soybeans, “but there’s a limit to that tolerance,” Hardke said. The chance of rice surviving “can drop dramatically” after being submerged for 10 days. If floodwaters cover the ground before young rice plants emerge from the soil, they can die even sooner, he added.
Hardke and Davis are part of a University of Arkansas team that estimated that the deluge inundated about 30 percent of the 839,000 acres that farmers had planted, amounting to losses of $79 million. Some wheat will be a total loss, while corn, soybeans, and rice will have to be replanted, the team reported.
Losses of rice were notably high despite its water tolerance. That’s in part because farmers often plant rice in fields with the poorest drainage. “Many fields have been flooded for more than 25 days now,” Hardke said. “Seeds that haven’t emerged are just rotting in the soil.”
Though losses would have been even higher later in the season, replanting costs will be significant. The extension service team estimated $11 million for corn, $10 million for soybeans, and $21 million for rice. Replanting costs include new seeds, herbicides, diesel fuel, and fertilizer. The aerial image below, taken by a farmer from the area, shows flooded fields and roads along the Cache.
“I don’t think most people realize how much time, money, and energy goes into every acre of crop that gets planted,” Davis said. “It’s expensive—a complete nightmare,” said Christian, noting that the flood killed all of his soybeans and 55 acres of rice.
Davis is using satellite observations to validate and supplement the extension team’s crop damage estimates, which are typically based on farmer surveys. The survey response rate can be low in some counties, but the growing availability of timely satellite observations makes it easier to assess the scope of flooding events quickly.
Davis typically uses imagery from several satellites to analyze an event like this—“anything and everything I can get,” he said, often leaning on data from Planet, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the European Space Agency. He uses the raw imagery to produce maps of flooded areas, which he then combines with data about crop type to calculate damage estimates.
“Then we share what we’re finding with the governor’s office, state and federal ag officials, and others involved in disaster response,” he said. “The goal is to deliver actionable information to people making decisions as quickly as possible.”
Source : nasa.gov