October 9, 2011
Flooding in Northern India
In early October 2011, flooding struck the Indian province of Bihar, drowning villages, destroying roads, and claiming lives. On October 9, 2011, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured the top image showing part of Bihar Province. For comparison, the bottom image shows the same area as observed by the Thematic Mapper on the Landsat 5 satellite on November 5, 2005.
In these false-color images, vegetation is bright green, water is blue, bare ground is earth-toned, and clouds are pale pink. In 2005, water is confined to a few river channels, and most of the area is dry. Six years later, water swells rivers and fills floodplains, particularly in the east.
References & Resources
NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team and Landsat 5 TM data courtesy of the United States Geological Survey. Caption by Michon Scott.
