24/08/2010

Flooding in Pakistan

Comparison of satellite imagery sometimes is the best way to objectively demonstrate the scale of natural disasters.  Such is the case for the disastrous flood in Pakistan that started earlier this month.

Floods on the Indus River continued to surge downstream into southern Pakistan more than three weeks after the initial floods started. By August 19, 2010 the floods had started to reach the Kotri Barrage, an irrigation structure immediately north of Hyderabad. The Kotri Barrage is the final such structure before the river empties into the Arabian Sea.  The Landsat-5 image below shows the situation before the floods. For the situation today, click on the link below.


Landsat-5 TM image acquired on July 31, 2009

Source: NASA.

06/08/2010

Fire and Smoke in Russia

Intense fires continued to rage in western Russia on August 4, 2010. Burning in dry peat bogs and forests, the fires produced a dense plume of smoke that reached across hundreds of kilometers. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured this view of the fires and smoke in three consecutive overpasses on NASA’s Terra satellite.


Source: NASA Earth Observatory

More information after the jump.

30/07/2010

BELSPO searches Space Programme Manager

The Space Research and Applications Division at the Belgian Science Policy (Belspo) is looking for a programme manager.

For more information, click here (Dutch) and here (French).