Flooding returned to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Rita came ashore, inundating parts of the Louisiana coast.

Hurricane Rita made landfall on Sept. 24, 2005 as a Category 3 storm, flooding much of the southwestern and central Louisiana shoreline.

The extent of the flooding can be seen by comparing these two images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite.

In the upper image, taken on Sept. 25, 2005, floods drench the shoreline in Hurricane Rita’s wake. The same region appears in an earlier image (bottom) taken on Sept. 21, 2005.

Louisiana’s shoreline appears as a line of barrier islands in the upper, post-Rita image. The trailing edge of the hurricane’s clouds – which appear as white and light blue – still blanket much of the area, though evidence of flooding in the hard-hit Lake Charles and Cameron areas can be seen.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: MODIS Rapid Response Team/NASA/GSFC.