TRMM

Link to Images Of Western Australia Floods

click to enlarge VERY LARGE [9.5 MB] Quicktime animation over Indonesia March - April , 2003 LARGE [ 1.4 MB] Quicktime animation over Indonesia March - April, 2003 SMALL [2.4 MB] mpeg animation over Indonesia March - April, 2003

A Torrent Buffets Indonesia
Heavy rains dumped a foot or more of water over several Indonesian island regions during March 29-April 1. The image on the left shows individual convective rain clouds over Papua New Guinea and Flores. The repeated occurrence of these storm cells add up to the totals shown on the image on the right. The right image graphically portrays heavy rain accumulations particularly over and offshore of Papua New Guinea and over the easternmost islands of Flores and Timor in Jakarta. The accumulation map was created using a technique that combines rainfall information from a number of NASA and DoD satellites. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite plays a key role in mapping the rain. The heavy rains occurred sporadically in the form of intense clusters of thunderstorms, embedded within the larger Winter Asian Monsoon circulation, and modulated by the passage of an atmospheric wave called the tropical intraseasonal oscillation. The very localized but extreme rain amounts over the island of Flores resulted in violent landslides that killed 23 people.

The tropical low associated with these damaging floods later developed into Typhoon Inigo. See Typhoon Inigo in TRMM's Extreme Events pages.