- Rain Totals (tiff) format (1.0 MB)
- Quicktime (.mov) format (890 KB)
- MPEG-1 (.mpg) format (1.38 MB)
Heavy rains have caused major flooding over parts of Brazil during thepast month where at least 66 people are reported to have perished as aresult of the flooding and mudslides brought on by the rain. Thenortheastern coastal city of Fortaleza was reported to have receivedover 10 inches of rain on the 29th of January alone, the highest dailytotal there since 1910. The rains were triggered by cold frontspushing up from the south and leaving behind boundaries that providethe focus for warm, humid air flowing in from the tropical Atlantic togenerate showers and thunderstorms.
The TRMM-based, near-real time Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis(MPA) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center monitors rainfall overthe global tropics. This image shows instantaneousrain rates on January 29 at 1200 UTC. It shows a sizeableconvective system along the northeast coastline of Brazilcontaining rain rates of up to 3/4 inch per hour (pinkish-purpleareas). Inland, weakly organized lines of scattered showers containrain rates on the order of 1/3 inch per hour (darker reds).
A second TRMM image, provided above, shows MPA rainfall totals fornortheastern Brazil for January 27 â February 3, 2004.Widespread areas of rainfall totals on the order of 3 to 5 inches(green areas) extend over much of the region with localized amountsapproaching 9 inches (red areas).
TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA.
References & Resources
Images produced by Hal Pierce (SSAI/NASA GSFC) and caption by Steve Lang (SSAI/NASA GSFC).
