They are the images from the air which show the full impact of Victoria's flood disaster.
In Shepparton satellite images taken before the floods began, show suburban houses, streets and parks as you would expect these areas to appear.
Houses are built closely together, streets can be seen winding between pockets of homes and trees stand on the edge of this suburban area.
But in pictures captured since the city's flooding began, this suburban area looks completely different.
Most of the photo appears brown — with floodwater covering streets and surrounding homes and parks.
In the suburb of Ascot Vale along the Maribyrnong River in Melbourne where floodwaters have now receded, the clean-up task ahead is obvious in images taken from above.
This picture shows parkland, tennis courts and sporting fields as they usually look.
But in a photo taken this week of the same spot, mud can be seen everywhere — it sits across the tennis courts, the parklands and even some of the roads.
While in Echuca photos taken from above show how dramatically floodwaters have impacted on that community.
In this photo taken before the floods, homes can be seen between a main road and the river.
But this picture of the same area shows the river's burst banks, with just the tops of the trees visible.
You can see where the road has been washed away and houses surrounded by floodwater.
Communities to be impacted for years, relief workers says
Across flood affected communities, the Salvation Army's Major Bruce Harmer, said he had noticed a sense of "bewilderment, people just can't believe that this is happening, just astonishment at what is happening".
The Salvation Army has a long history of involvement in disaster recovery efforts.
Major Harmer said there was one word he could think of to best describe the scale of flooding unfolding in Victoria.
"I think the word unprecedented is used far too often these days but it is the word which would describe what is happening at the moment," he said.
"Many of the people who are living in that area have never experienced a flood, they have never experienced anything like this and it is displacing many people and it is going to take them years to find their feet again."
Across the state more than 18,000 applications have already been made for emergency relief payments.
Evacuations have occurred along Melbourne suburbs near the Maribyrnong River as well as northern Victorian communities along the Campaspe, Goulburn and Murray Rivers, including in the cities and towns of Shepparton, Rochester, Echuca, Mooroopna and Moama — just across the border in New South Wales.
As well as homes communities have also lost roads, businesses, crops and community infrastructure to the floods.
The SES has received more than 8,000 calls for help and carried out 730 rescues.
Eleven relief centres remain open and many residents forced to flee their homes have been put-up in temporary accommodation.
Such is the scale of these floods, Major Harmer said his organisation had noticed flood victims in evacuation centres who were unsure of what to do and had struggled to comprehend what they had witnessed.
Right now, Major Harmer said, flood victims who had lost homes or businesses, needed evacuation support.
"Initially people need emotional support, they need food and shelter and that is what the evacuation centres, and can I say families and friends, would be providing to those displaced," he said.
But Major Harmer said such was the scale of this flood disaster, communities would need support well after the floodwaters dropped.
"Then we move into the recovery phase where people think 'what am I going to do? Where are we going to stay? And then they try to find their way back to some form of normality and that can take many months," he explained.
After that he said, individual families would need ongoing support from case workers to get through the aftermath and challenges of surviving these floods.
One thing Major Harmer said the Salvation Army had noticed, was a lack of understanding at times from the general public about the amount of destruction floods cause because they don't always look as shocking as bushfires do.
"It just looks like a nice big lake that just happens to be in the middle of the city or the town, sometimes with the wider public it doesn't quite resonate that these people are going through an absolutely life-changing experience," he said.
"When you see a fire, you see the flames, you see the devastation of the fire but it is not until the floodwaters recede that the true impact of the flood events are going to be realised by many people," he said.
To understand the scale of the disaster, scientists say we need to understand the cause
While we won't see the full human impact of the floods for some time, scientists say we can understand much about what has happened, if we look at what occurred in the lead up to this flood event.
Milton Speer is a visiting fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, he previously worked as a meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology and he has spent decades researching climate change science and its impacts on ecosystems.
He said to understand the flooding we have seen in the past week we need to understand a term called the Indian Ocean Dipole.
"The Indian Ocean Dipole measures the surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, and if they are warmer than average surface temperatures in the eastern part of Indian Ocean adjacent to Australia, which is currently the case, then the Indian Ocean Dipole is in a negative state," he explained.
When this occurs, Dr Speer said, late winter and spring rain is potentially increased across South East Australia.
You may be wondering how ocean temperatures can lead to flooding. Dr Speer explained the connection between those two events in this way.
"That sea surface temperature pattern encourages low pressure troughs to develop near Australia," he said.
He said these troughs had been developing more over land recently and "slowing down as they develop over South Australia and western NSW and then they spread their rainbands down through NSW and Victoria".
He said that slow movement was one of the key aspects of these pressure systems.
"It's allowing rainbands to come through and eventually they have been hitting western NSW and northern Victoria north of the Great Divide frequently, once a week almost since late winter," Dr Speer recounted.
He said one of the reasons these rain systems had been developing so slowly was because the much faster moving westerly winds, which were usually seen at this time of year across South East Australia, had been occurring much further south.
"That is one of the well-known consequences of increased global warming," Dr Speer said.
The climate scientist said these weather patterns had filled up the river systems running north towards the Murray River — including the Campaspe River and Goulburn River which had flooded communities in Rochester, Shepparton and Echuca.
All of this rain, Dr Speer said, had left many of the state's rivers full and catchments saturated.
While Australia has also been in a La Nina weather pattern, which typically increases rainfall in northern and eastern Australia during spring, Dr Speer said he didn't believe that had been the main driver of the current floods, like it was for the floods around Lismore earlier this year.
With a changing climate, flood infrastructure struggles to cope
For leading environmental engineer Asish Sharma from the University of NSW, these floods have shown the limits of existing stormwater and flood prevention infrastructure.
He said saturated soil in river catchments had been behind the flooding events seen since last week.
But he blamed more than simply saturated soil for the floods of the past week.
"On top of that we have the two factors which increase rainfall — the factors being the La Nina event which is something which has historically been known to result in higher rain and secondly higher temperatures," he said.
While Professor Sharma attributed more of the recent weather to La Nina than Dr Speer did — the Bureau of Meteorology in a climate update earlier this month, acknowledged the combined impact of La Nina and the Indian Ocean Dipole.
It said because of the combination of both "the likelihood of above average rainfall over Australia is further increased, particularly for the eastern half of the continent".
Now, Professor Sharma said communities around the world needed to consider whether their flood protections measures were adequate for a changing climate.
"Our infrastructure had been very well designed, it had been designed to protect us against flood extremes, but the extreme we were predicting to be occurring was the typical flooding associated with a typical La Nina," he explained.
But with temperatures increasing, he said we needed to consider what more needed to be done to protect communities.
He said improving flood protection infrastructure would be the easiest option to deal with a changing flood risk for communities, but would be costly.
"The more difficult thing to do is to stop the root cause, which is the increase in the greenhouse gas concentration which has resulted in higher temperatures," he said.
For now though, the focus for many communities remained on their immediate needs.
It's the challenge of surviving rising floodwaters, protecting homes and businesses and starting the heartbreaking work of cleaning up after this disaster.
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2022-10-20 19:28:56Z
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