A couple of weeks ago we had a look at three different floods around the world, including Lima, Peru. However, the flooding in Peru was very extensive, so today we are looking at some other locations around Peru.
Here is a ‘before and after’ showing how the Moche River, which passes through Trujillo, Peru, created a new delta:
Moche River delta creation.
Further north we can see how the Chancay River grew significantly wider:
Chancay River. We are seeing it after the water has subsided from it highest levels.
Zooming out and using Landsat imagery, we can see some large areas that were completely flooded. They are naturally swampy areas, but we could not find this extent of flooding in older imagery, so we believe it to be quite unusual.
Left: Google Earth imagery composed of Landsat/Sentinel-2 mosaic. Right: Landsat image from April 4th, 2017.
To find the above locations in Google Earth, download this KML file
. We have included an image overlay of the Landsat image. We have also outlined all the 2017 imagery we could find for Peru. If you come across any other 2017 imagery in the region, please let us know in the comments.
The inland parts of Peru drain into the Amazon basin. There was also significant flooding there, but it is rain forest, so it is unlikely that we will see any high resolution satellite imagery (too much cloud cover). It also seems probable that as the water flows towards the ocean we will see floods along the Amazon in Brazil later in the year.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.