Maastricht (Holland), February 1995

The heavy rainfall at the end of January 95, together with the snow melt in the Alps, caused extensive flooding along the Maas (or Meuse) river.

On 25 January the water level of the Maas river started rising dangerously in southern Holland, near the town of Maastricht. On 30 January the Government of The Netherlands decided to evacuate about 75,000 people living along the Maas and the Waal.

Click on the thumbnail to view the full size image

(600 * 716 pixels, 166 Kb JPEG)
Image area coverage: 25 x 30 km

This SAR multitemporal image represents the region of Maastricht, Netherlands. The Maas (or Meuse) river flows from the bottom to the upper part of the image showing the boundary line between Belgium (left) and the Netherlands (right).

The colours in the image are achieved by merging the two data sets assigning a blue colour to the September (normal situation) acquisition and yellow colour (red+green) to the January (flood) acquisition. This makes it possible to visualise clearly all the changes between the two acquisition dates.

The most significant changes are marked in blue showing the flooding areas. They are located mainly along the Maas river, representing a total surface within the image of 3520 hectares.

Near the middle of the picture, just south of the large flooded areas, lies the city of Maastricht, shown by bright dots.

A canal (in black - dark blue), starting south of Maastricht and flowing west, near the city of Genk (Belgium) is also clearly visible in the image.

Technical information about the image:

Satellite / Sensor: ERS-1 SAR
In Red: January 30th, 1995 - In Green: January 30th, 1995- In Blue: September 21th, 1994
Orbits: 18531, 16651, Frame 2583
Acquired by: Fucino (Italy)