Exploratory: generated automatically from the UmaTerra platforms' data; not independently validated or peer reviewed.

UmaTerra · story Português
Water · fire · climate · Brazil

The Pantanal drying out: forty years of water, year by year

The Pantanal lives by a pulse: water rises with the rains of the upper Paraguay, covers the plain for months and recedes. MapBiomas has measured that water every year since 1985. This story compares the years, shows what took the water's place and the fire that came with the drought, and reads the climate ahead in climate-shift.

Loading the numbers…

—less water in 2024 than at the record's peak measured
—of surface water, from the peak to 2024 measured
—burned in 2020, the worst fire year measured
—per decade in the measured water deficit measured

measured by satellite or from the geometry itself. estimated projected by climate models, or a reading that depends on a threshold. missing a part that did not respond this time.

1

The largest floodplain on the planet

The other UmaTerra platforms read the Pantanal piece by piece; this story brings MapBiomas' water, land cover and fire, and climate-shift's climate, into one place.

2

1988: the year water covered everything

The record starts with large floods. The darkest bar is 1988, the highest value; the orange one, 2024.

3

The same rivers, less and less plain

Five years side by side, all with the same method: 1988, 2005, 2018, 2024 and 2025.

4

2024: the year with the least water on record

Yearly water hides each year's rhythm. The monthly product shows the pulse: the wettest and the driest month.

5

A dry floodplain burns

MapBiomas Fire measures the area burned each year, at 30 m.

6

What took the water's place

MapBiomas land cover (Collection 11) says what the plain turned into.

7

One 10 km circle, from 1985 to 2025

climate-shift traces each pixel of the circle from 1985 to today: on the left what it was, on the right what it is.

8

What has been measured, and what comes next

climate-shift brings together the water deficit measured since 1981, nine CMIP6 models and the fire weather index.

9

The future in three readings

Which world it is, where that climate already exists, and which Köppen class the circle falls in.

10

El Niño, La Niña and the climate ahead

ENSO's state now, what El Niño and La Niña have already done here from October to March, and those same seasons in the 2041–2070 climate. An exploratory reading: few seasons per phase.

11

climate-shift's story

climate-shift also writes its result up in paragraphs, for readers who do not read charts.

12

Where every number came from

Every number on this page comes from a public service or dataset, listed here.

umaterra.com.br · Pantanal
Loading…measured
Loading the numbers…

What this story does not say

Another story: Katrina, 2005 →

Written with Claude Opus 5.5, by Anthropic, from the numbers Earth Engine and climate-shift computed: no number comes from the model. Versão em português.

Notes

  1. MapBiomas Água marks a pixel as water in a year when it held surface water that year, from all the Landsat images of the year; the monthly product does the same month by month. Biome areas were summed at 90 m (at 30 m the sums do not finish in time), the circle at 30 m. MapBiomas Água, Collection 5 (1985–2025).
  2. Burned pixels come masked in MapBiomas Fire; here they are counted after unmasking to zero. MapBiomas Fire, Collection 5; Alencar et al. (2022), Remote Sensing 14, 2510.
  3. Classes 33 (river, lake), 11 (flooded field and wetland), 12 (grassland), 15 (pasture), 4 (savanna) and 3 (forest). A field that stopped flooding can move from 11 to 12 with no change of use. MapBiomas, Collection 11; Souza et al. (2020), Remote Sensing 12, 2735.
  4. climate-shift counts area, not damage. The water deficit is TerraClimate's (~4 km); the projection is the median of nine NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 models and fire danger is NASA's NEX-GDDP-FWI. Abatzoglou et al. (2018); Thrasher et al. (2022); Park et al., NEX-GDDP-FWI.