The State of Washington and the Province of BC are in a state of emergency because of the weather. The situation began when the Pacific Northwest received a lot of rain that caused already-rising rivers to overflow. Thousands of animals were drowned in farmland due to blocked roads, mudslides, fallen bridges, and other causes.
The damage was photographed from space by Earth observation satellites, one of which was the European Space Agency. These images show the extent of the floods in the Nooksack and Fraser River valleys this week, which washed out roads and forced the evacuate of thousands of people.
The EU designed and built a constellation of two identical Earth observations satellites to deliver a wealth of data and imagery central to the European Union's Copernicus environmental program. Each satellite carries a wide array of high-resolution multispectral imagers that can photograph the Earth's land and vegetation.
Washington State was imaged in the optical and radar band by the satellites. Credit:Copernicus-Sentinel
The image above shows the flooded areas between the towns of Linden and Ferndale and the heavy silt that is emptying into Lumni and Bellingham Bay. The radar band snapped additional photos before and after the heavy rains, but the images could not penetrate the clouds.
The images were combined to create a blue area with dark areas corresponding to the heaviest flooding. More than 158,000 people were affected by the resulting power outages and disruptions to other services, in addition to the hundreds who were evacuated. Mudslides forced the closing of I-5, which was re-opened.
Chris Hadfield shared a NASA image that shows the extent of flooding from the Fraser River in British Columbia. The flooding up-river resulted in a lot of topsoil being washed out into the Salish Sea between the mainland and Vancouver Island, though out instances of outflow can be seen along the coast of Washington State.
One can see the large bay in the lower left-hand side of the image that sits between the Saanich Peninsula and the southern tip of Vancouver Island. There are outflows from the Gulf Islands and between the city of Nanaimo and Gabriola Island further north. The image captures the flooding imaged by the satellites in Bellingham Bay and further south in Puget Sound.
The images show the extent of the recent bout of extreme weather, which was described as the worst case of flooding in over a century. They show how Earth Observation satellites are used to identify and address the symptoms of Climate Change. Satellite images help to understand and respond to disasters when average temperatures, sea levels, flooding, and extreme weather increase due to higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
They help us to see the problem in a way that reminds us that Earth is a single system, and that what happens in one part of the world has consequences for all the other parts.
Further reading: CTV News.
