July 30, 2007 - Floods in Central China

Jeff Schmaltz / MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC · Download full size image

Apart from being China's second-largest fresh-water lake, Dongting Hu is a natural flood basin for the Yangtze River in central China. Every year, between June and September, the shallow lake fills with water when the Yangtze River rises as a result of melting snow at its headwaters and summer rains along its length. These images, captured by the MODIS on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites, shows the lake filling between May and July 2007.

In late May, Dongting Lake was nearly dry. A drought the previous year left water levels low. After a rainy June, the lake had grown in three distinct lobes (east, west, and south) as shown in the main image from July 4, 2007. If you move your mouse over the image, you'll see the contrasting image from May. By July, the Yuan and Li Rivers, which feed the lake in the south, were swollen. Loaded with light-scattering sediment, the water in the rivers is dusty blue, while the clearer or deeper water in the lake is black.

The images were made with infrared and visible light to increase the contrast between water and land. Plant-covered land in this richly vegetated region is bright green. Clouds are pale blue and white. Cities, which are most visible along Dongting Lake's eastern shore, are gray-brown. The largest city shown in the images is Yueyang in the top right corner.

The floods shown in this image pushed an estimated two billion rats out of their habitat near the lake's shores. The rats swarmed over farmland and destroyed up to 1.6 million hectares (4 million acres) of crops, said China Daily. Dongting Lake is just one region that experienced severe flooding in the summer of 2007. Unusually heavy summer rains caused widespread flooding throughout central China, particularly in the Huai River basin. Posted on: 18 Feb, 2008

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