Lake Meredith National Recreation Area takes its name from the water body it surrounds in the Texas Panhandle. The Amarillo-area lake sees more than a million visitors a year.

Visitor numbers were much smaller just a few years ago. More than a decade of drought shrank water levels at Lake Meredith until a rush of rain in 2017 brought a turnaround.

These Landsat images highlight the lake’s return. Each image was captured in November and rendered to reflect natural color using bands 4, 3, and 2 of Landsat’s Operational Land Imager.

The 2013 image shows the lake as a green spot on an otherwise drab landscape. The northeast tip of the lake runs up against a dam that separates it from the parched Canadian River.

By 2018, the lake’s surface area more than doubled in size.

Landsat imagery is a useful tool for monitoring and characterizing both natural and manmade change. Landsat imagery is available at no charge through tools like EarthExplorer, LandsatLook and GloVis.