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DEVASTATING TROPICAL CYCLONE NARGIS HITS MYANMAR
Powerful Cyclone Nargis made landfall this past weekend in Myanmar. Cyclone Nargis is the deadliest cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people perished in Bangladesh from a land-falling cyclone that year.
The Associated Press noted that a Myanmar state-run radio station reported on May 5, that more than 22,464 people were confirmed dead, and thousands were missing. The United Nations estimates up to a million could be homeless. Before coming ashore NARGIS intensified to become a powerful category four tropical cyclone with wind speeds estimated at 115 knots (132 mph). NARGIS, the first tropical cyclone of the North Indian Ocean season, is shown in the image above when NARGIS was overflown by the TRMM Satellite on 3 May 2008 at 0043 UTC. By this time NARGIS had weakened to mininal hurricane force with wind speeds of about 70 knots (80 miles per hour).
Although very strong winds were responsible for much of the damage with
Nargis, flooding and mudslides were also possible due to heavy rainfall.
TRMM was used to calibrate rainfall estimates from other satellites in the rainfall analysis shown above. The TRMM-based, near-real time Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (MPA) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center monitors rainfall over the global Tropics. MPA rainfall totals from April 27 to May 4, 2008 are shown above in relation to the NARGIS track (identified by the storm/cyclone symbols connected by a black line).
This graph shows a time series of rainfall over southern
Myanmar and the Andaman Sea with almost 600 Millimeters (23.6 inches) of rainfall in some areas.
Images and caption by Hal Pierce (SSAI/NASA GSFC)
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