China’s Unrelenting Season of Flooding

Typography

The 2020 monsoon has brought historic amounts of rain to the country.

The 2020 summer monsoon season has delivered historic amounts of rain to China. Since June, unusually strong, stationary weather systems have produced frequent storms and heavy rainfall in major river basins in central, southwestern, and northeastern China. By September, news outlets reported that the country had experienced at least 21 large scale floods in 2020—the most floods since 1996.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured these scenes of Songhua River in the Heilongjiang Province of northeast China on November 1, 2019 (left) and October 25, 2020 (right). These false-color images use infrared and visible light (bands 7-2-1) to better distinguish water from land. Vegetation appears green, water appears dark blue, and bare land appears brown.

In September, Typhoon Maysak brought persistent rainfall to the Heilongjiang Province and flooded nearby areas.

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Image via NASA Earth Observatory