English: Before Tropical Cyclone Freddy hit Malawi, the landlocked country in southeastern Africa already faced serious food insecurity. By some estimates, one-third of the nation’s population was on the brink of extreme hunger, 37 percent of children under 5 were chronically malnourished, and 70 percent of people lived below the international poverty line.

Then, starting on March 11, 2023, Freddy arrived and dropped six months’ worth of rain in six days. Rivers overflowed their banks, washed away homes and villages, and destroyed crops. In the aftermath of the storm, more than 1,000 people were reported killed or missing as of early April, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“But that was just the first phase of the disaster,” said Christina Jade Justice, an agriculture and food security monitoring expert with NASA Harvest and lead of the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning initiative, which published a special report detailing conditions in southern Malawi in the aftermath of the storm. “Now we are in the midst of a slower-moving catastrophe that is affecting farmers. With many crops damaged or completely destroyed this season, food supply and access are a growing concern.”

In the days after the storm, preliminary observatons based on an analysis using flood water extent from Canada’s RADARSAT constellation, overlaid on a national scale cropland map developed by NASA Harvest, revealed particularly extensive flooding in the Nsanje, Chikwawa, Mulanje, and Phalombe districts of southern Malawi.

One month after the storm, damage to crops was still visible. This image (top-right), acquired with the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite on April 10, 2023, shows damaged fields in southern Malawi along the Shire and Ruo rivers near Makhanga in the Nsanje district. The left image shows the same area on March 9, before the storm.