NASA satellites capture images of severe flooding in Pakistan

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 (UPI) -- Torrential rains led to massive flooding in northeastern Pakistan this week. The monsoons dropped more than foot of rain in just a few days, devastating more than a thousand villages, killing several hundred people, and displacing some two million residents in the India-Pakistan border region of Jammu and Kashmir.

NASA captured the transformation of the floodplains in a series of snapshots taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite -- one of the space agency's many satellites dedicated to studying Earth and its atmosphere.

The first of the three images shows the region on August 31, when the area was still moderately dry. Up until the last several days, Pakistan had witnessed a relatively quiet monsoon season. The second two images shows the flood waters collecting and inundating the plains.

From above, the floods look quite beautiful, the blue slowly growing and encroaching upon the bright green vegetation of northeast Pakistan's fertile valleys. But down below, it's not quite so pretty. In addition to lost lives, the flooding has caused extensive property damage.

Pakistan has suffered severe flooding during every monsoon season since 2010 -- each year, the economic damages totaling in the billions.