(CNN) — Striking images from the Sahara Desert show large lakes etched into rolling sand dunes after one of the most arid, barren places in the world was hit with its first floods in decades.

The before-and-after photos included satellite images of the Sahara Desert, known as the world's largest hot desert, taken in 2023 and 2024. In the first photo, the terrain is mostly dry.

Satellite images released by NASA show pockets of plant life popping up all over the Sahara Desert after an extratropical cyclone drenched a large swath of northwestern Africa on Sept. 7 and Sept. 8.

Sahara Desert is flooding after receiving a year's worth of rain in 2 days 00:18. A rare deluge of rainfall left blue lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara desert ...

The Sahara does experience rain, but usually just a few inches a year and rarely in late summer. Over two days in September, however, intense rain fell in parts of the desert in southeast Morocco ...