English: Heavy rains soaked parts of Australia in the opening weeks of 2019, causing immensely destructive and disastrous flooding in Queensland by mid-February. After seven years of drought, the floods killed hundreds of thousands of cattle and laid waste to crops growing in the region. Floodwaters also spread southward, causing the Diamantina River to spill over its banks and Lake Eyre to fill. Lake Eyre is a large, ephemeral lake sitting in a semi-arid region. At times of drought it withers to form a salt pan, but in heavy rain it can fill to become the largest lake in Australia.

On May 7, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image of the flooded Channel Country of southwestern Queensland.

Typically this region is an arid landscape dotted with a series of flood plains from rivers with flow only intermittently. At the time this image was acquired, the Diamantina River (center) as well as surrounding rivers had filled their flood plains to create lakes. Lake Eyre cannot be seen in this image as it sits southwest of the lower edge and just out of sight. On May 9, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) issued a Moderate Flood Warning for the Lower Diamantina River, reporting that the flood waters were falling very slowly.