---
title: "Monitoring Lake Mead Drought"
description: "A photo of Lake Mead's cracked, exposed lake bed during the 2022 drought, with a link to our Sentinel-2 tutorial that measures the shrinking shoreline."
url: https://www.technicalgis.com/2022/08/11/monitoring-lake-mead-drought/
author: TechnicalGIS Team
publisher: TechnicalGIS (https://www.technicalgis.com/about/)
published: 2022-08-11
updated: 2022-08-11
language: en-GB
---

# Monitoring Lake Mead Drought

> A photo of Lake Mead's cracked, exposed lake bed during the 2022 drought, with a link to our Sentinel-2 tutorial that measures the shrinking shoreline.

## Key takeaways

1.  A photograph of Lake Mead's cracked, exposed lake bed during the 2022 drought.
2.  To put a number on it, the Sentinel-2 tutorial measures the lake's open water from 2019 to 2025 in Python.

![Cracked, dried mud on Lake Mead’s exposed lake bed during the 2022 drought.](https://www.technicalgis.com/_astro/lake_mead_dessication_cracking.CfHdVCQw_Z1odM6s.webp)

> **Update (2026):** want to measure the shrinking lake yourself? Our new tutorial, [Measuring Lake Mead’s shrinking shoreline with Sentinel-2, STAC and Python](https://www.technicalgis.com/tutorials/sentinel-2-stac-lake-mead/), computes the water extent from 2019 to 2025 in Python.

## Data for this article

-   [GIS data sources for the United States](https://www.technicalgis.com/data-sources/united-states/)
-   [Earth Search STAC API](https://www.technicalgis.com/data-sources/#src-earth-search-stac-api) · Sentinel-2 L2A as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs

Licences and formats for each source are listed in the [GIS data sources catalogue](https://www.technicalgis.com/data-sources/).

---

Source: https://www.technicalgis.com/2022/08/11/monitoring-lake-mead-drought/