NASA's AIRS Instrument Captures Before and After Views of Pakistan Flooding

In late July 2010, flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains began in several regions of Pakistan, including the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and parts of Baluchistan. According to the Associated Press, the floods have affected about one-fifth of the country. Tens of thousands of villages have been flooded, more than 1,500 people have been killed, and millions have been left homeless. The floodwaters are not expected to fully recede before late August. These two false-color images of the region were taken by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft, using the instrument's four visible and near-infrared channels. The images include southern Pakistan, including the Sindh Province. The Indus River appears to enter from the upper right and winds southwestward toward the lower left. The image at left was taken before the flooding on July 9, 2010, while the image on the right was taken Aug. 10, 2010. Both were taken at 1:30 p.m. local time. The spatial resolution of the images is 14 kilometers (8.5 miles), and each image covers an area measuring 1,650 by 1,980 kilometers (1,023 by 1,228 miles).

AIRS is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., under contract to NASA. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about AIRS can be found at http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov.

Image credit: NASA/JPL