August 10, 2020. (Click image for complete comprehensive view.)
Australian meteorologists remembered just recently when not one—however 2—huge bands of clouds extended from the eastern Indian Ocean to Australia, directing streams of wetness that provided extreme rains to both sides of the continent.
Moisture-transferring climatic rivers happen all over the world and frequently struck Australia, however it is unusual for 2 of the rainmakers to strike simultaneously, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. One of them provided more than 150 millimeters (6 inches) of rain in less than 24 hours to Western Australia’s Nullabar Coast, a dry location that normally gets 24 millimeters of rain in the entire of August. The 2nd system dropped big volumes of rain on New South Wales.
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite recorded this natural-color picture of the cloud bands on August 10, 2020.
Atmospheric rivers are typically called Northwest Cloud Bands in Australia. The exact same kind of occasion in the United States is informally called the Pineapple Express, due to the fact that it brings wetness from the tropical Pacific near Hawaii to the U.S. West Coast.
There are some signs that the frequency of climatic rivers might be increasing as worldwide environment modifications. After exploring 30 years of satellite information (1984-2014) for Northwest Cloud Bands impacting Australia, a group of University of Melbourne scientists concluded that the variety of cloud band days had actually increased by almost one day each year over the research study duration.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, utilizing VIIRS information from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.
