The NASA Earth Observatory has just posted a very powerful false-color image of the flooding that resulted from opening the Morganza spillway last week.

The reason for the false-color in this imagery is to more easily highlight the flooded areas. Specifically:

The false-color images combine infrared, red, and green wavelengths to help distinguish between water and land. Clear water is blue, and sediment-laden water is a dull blue-gray. Vegetation is red; the brighter the red, the more robust the vegetation. Gray patches away from the center of the floodway are likely farm fields that have recently been burned or cleared.

To see it for yourself, you can download this KML file. Be warned that it’s pulling a 4MB image, so it’ll take a few seconds to load.

(via NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day)