Heavy rains forced 120,000 people out of their homes in Sri Lanka, the Associated Press reported on January 11, 2011. Sri Lanka’s government stated that the death toll from flooding had risen to 13, and officials were arranging food drops to hardest-hit areas in the east.
This color-coded image shows rainfall amounts over Sri Lanka and the Bay of Bengal from January 3–9. The heaviest rainfall appears in dark blue, and the lightest rainfall appears in light green. The heaviest precipitation is concentrated over eastern Sri Lanka.
This image is based on data from the Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis produced at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which estimates rainfall by combining measurements from many satellites and calibrating them using rainfall measurements from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using near-real-time data provided courtesy of TRMM Science Data and Information System at Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.
