Monsoon rains in much of Pakistan

Monsoon rains in much of Pakistan during July caused flooding in tens of thousands of villages across Pakistan, resulting in thousands of deaths and left millions homeless.

More than 16 inches of rain in northern Pakistan in late July has overflowed the Indus and Kabul rivers and displaced millions of people as the high waters have flowed downstream for weeks, destroying thousands of villages and affecting more than one-fifth of the country as the waters flow south where they will eventually empty into the Arabian Sea.

The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft captured this image over the city of Sukkur, Pakistan, on Wednesday along the Indus River, Pakistan's longest, which snakes vertically from north to south and is the basis for the world's largest canal-based irrigation system.