ICTSDC's blog

Town of Tulun

Significant portion of the town was flooded as the water level on the river Iya rised after heavy rains. False color image from Sentinel-2B from 29.06.2019. Source: Sentinel Hub

Melting snow is filling the rivers in Altai Krai with flood waters above the safe levels. The rivers in the upper Ob basin are overflowing and their discharge is limited by the river Ob that remains frozen downstream.

An image acquired with Sentinel-2A Multispectral Instrument on March 29, 2018 show the extent of floods in Shipunovo district of Altai Krai.

River Daldykan to the West of Norilsk, a mining town in the northern part of Siberia in Russia, turned attention after photographs of its ruby colored waters appeared on the web on September 5, 2016.

#Norilsk, northern #Russia: the site of copper & nickel #mining & #environment|al degradation pic.twitter.com/2s6kRXPsql

— Alex Kokcharov (@AlexKokcharov) September 7, 2016

Looking at Landsat images of the area it turns out that the river keeps its color for several years already. The red colored waters flow from a waste reservoir connected by a pipeline to Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant towards the lake Pyasino down the rivers Daldykan and Ambarnaya.

Landsat 8 image shows the waste reservoir colored red (bottom centre), the river Daldykan (flows bottom to top in the middle of the image), the point where the river Daldykan merges into river Ambarnaya. The characteristic red color of the water is visible already. Image taken on August 10, 2016 (Scene ID: LC81530112016223LGN00), processed with GRASS GIS.

Dry and hot weather for the past couple of weeks resulted in intense wildfires in Eastern Siberia. This includes Eastern parts of Krasnoyarsk Kray, North of Irkutsk Oblast and West of Sakha-Yakutiya. Intense fires burn in the vicinity of Ust-Ilimskoe vodokhranilische reservoir, Verkhnechonsk oil field, a wildfire is burning within 5 kilometer range of the village of Yerbogachen that has a population of just under 2000.

Karymsky volcano on Kamchatka peninsula has started to erupt on the 2nd of April 2014. MODIS data taken on April, 16 provides a clear cloud-free image of the erupting volcano