These images show a wider view of the Tulare lakebed. Smaller towns to the south, Allensworth and Alpaugh, were surrounded by water from overflowing rivers and were both under evacuation warnings as of the end of March. Many homes in the city have been flooded and several roads have been closed. With a population of 22,000 people, Corcoran is the largest city in the vicinity of the historic lake. The image on the left, acquired by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI) on Landsat 9, shows the same area in March 2022. Vegetation is green and bare ground is brown. The image is false color, which makes the water (dark blue) stand out from its surroundings. On March 29, 2023, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite acquired this image (above-right) of agricultural fields near Corcoran covered with water. Heavy rain and snow in the first three months of 2023 has once again brought water to Tulare’s lakebed. Since then, the lakebed has been covered with farms that grow a variety of crops. By 1920, the rivers that fed the lake were dammed and diverted for uses such as irrigation. The lake would grow every winter as rainfall and snowmelt from the nearby Sierra Nevada range flowed down and filled the basin.
Tulare Lake, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River.
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