A month of intense monsoon rains has left many of India’s rivers flowing over their banks. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the top image of flooded rivers in eastern India through a small break in the clouds on August 7, 2005. The image shows flooding near the confluence of the Tungabhadra and Krishna Rivers in India’s Andhra Pradesh state. At least 10,000 people had been evacuated from the banks of the Krishna River a few days before this image was acquired. The lower image shows the rivers on June 15, 2005, just before the rains started. Both images are shown in false color so that water is dark blue, clouds are white and light blue, vegetation is bright green, and bare ground is tan.
Monsoon-triggered floods killed more than 1,000 people in western India during the last week of July and the first week of August 2005. The most serious flooding occurred in Mumbai (Bombay), northeast of the area shown in this image, after a record 942 millimeters (37 inches) of rain fell in 24 hours on July 26. See “Record Rainfall over Bombay” on the Earth Observatory for more information. Daily images of India are available from the MODIS Rapid Response Team.
NASA images courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.
