The rain and snow that falls on the United States in a typical year amounts to about 2000 trillion gallons of water. But of course, it's not evenly distributed in space or in time, so flooding can occur in some areas while others experience drought. That's been the case the last few weeks as rivers topped their banks in the upper Midwest while drought led to wildfires in Florida.

Satellites give us an unprecedented view of both events. Here's a close-up color-enhanced satellite image of the upper Mississippi River Valley, taken last week. Normally, in a picture like this, rivers show up as thin threads of blue, but here the swollen Mississippi and its tributaries appear much wider due to the flooding.

A thousand miles away in the Sunshine state, there's been too much sun, too little rain, and more than 2000 wildfires this year. In this satellite image of west-central Florida, the heat signatures of the fires appear reddish, while their smoke shows up as a light blue haze. The fires in Florida this year have burned more than 160,000 acres - that's an area about half the size of New Castle County.