March 7, 2022 - Floodwaters Reach Australia's Channel Country
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Torrential rains over eastern Australia brought severe flooding to
parts of Queensland and New South Wales in early March 2022. Media
reported that tens of thousands of residents along southeastern
Australia coast had been evacuated, with about 1,000 rescues in New
South Wales by March 1. According to AccuWeather, the city of Brisbane
received more than 24.1 inches (611.6 mm) of rain in a three-day period
(February 24-27), setting the record for its wettest three-day period
since weather data tracking begin in 1840. According to the Center for
Disaster Philanthropy, the Insurance Council of Australia extended the
area declared an insurance catastrophe from south-east Queensland into
northern New South Wales in order to help prioritize handling more than
15,000 claims that had already been lodged by March 1.
While the floods were nothing short of catastrophic across the coastal
regions, the flooding has brought water trickling inland, even to
Australia’s Channel Country—an area so named because of the dry
riverbeds (channels) that mark the arid interior area. The region is
also known for its ephemeral lakes, which are dry (or nearly so) most
of the year. Channel Country flooding is a fairly common occurrence at
the end of summer, but this year’s massive flooding has brought large
amounts of water to the region.
On March 3, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)
on board NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a false color image of flooding
in the Channel Country of southwestern Queensland. This type of
false-color image is particularly useful to separate out deep water
(deep blue) and shallow water or moist salt flats (light blue) from dry
land (brown) and vegetation (bright green). This image shows water in
Lakes Machattie, Mipia and Koolivoo. The floodplains of the Georgina
River and Eyre Creek are flushed with green vegetation far northward,
heading into the Northern Territory.
While this one image is useful to show the amount of water in the
region on this particular day, to better understand the change over
time it is best to compare two images. Thanks to the NASA Worldview
app, it is easy to view two Aqua MODIS images of the same area
collected on two different days. A roll over comparison of this image,
acquired March 3 and another acquired before the flooding, on January
24 can be viewed by clicking here
Worldview: Explore Your Dynamic Planet The NASA Worldview app provides
a satellite's perspective of the planet as it looks today and as it has
in the past through daily satellite images. Worldview is part of NASA’s
Earth Observing System Data and Information System. EOSDIS makes the
agency's large repository of data accessible and freely available to
the public.
Image Facts
Satellite: Aqua
Date Acquired: 3/3/2022
Resolutions: 1km (33.7 KB), 500m (73.4 KB), 250m (187 KB)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC
https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2022-03-07
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