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Flooding is a natural and recurring feature of the lower Mekong River. Every year, from August right through to November, the monsoon brings abundant rainfall to Southeast Asia, and the Mekong River swells well beyond its dry season water levels. With the floods comes nutrient-rich silt that is deposited on farmland and wetlands around the river.
The false-color image was taken in September 2005, when the monsoon season was underway and flood levels along the Mekong and the Tonle Sap were rising rapidly, inundating vast areas in the lower portion of the river basin. The image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard the Terra / Aqua series of Earth observation satellites. Vegetation appears in bright green, water is blue and black, and clouds are white and light blue. The flooded areas along the Mekong river and the Tonle Sap are clearly outlined.
Images of this type are made available on the internet to users all over the world on a daily basis by the American space agency NASA, through the MODIS Rapid Response team. Stretching over an area of more than 2000 km, MODIS images are useful to obtain frequent environmental observations of the entire lower Mekong basin at a moderate resolution of up to 250 m, cloud cover permitting.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory / MODIS Rapid Response team.
Click on the thumbnail images to obtain a detailed view (250 m resolution; image size 3.7 Mb
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/
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