In terms of impacts, the floods that hit the island of Java in January/February of 2002 were extreme: newspapers reported up to 100 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands left homeless. Individual daily rainfall totals, however, are not as suggestive: the Jakarta station at BMG, for example, recorded no more than 169 mm on any one day, well below the absolute record of 330mm (Jan 1977). Yet for the 20 days from the 21st of January to the 9th of February, the station received a grand total of 757 mm, 195% of the long-term January mean (390 mm), and 270% of the long-term February mean (280 mm). Such large 20-day totals were typical: Tanjung Priok received 772 mm, Depok 800 mm, and Bekasi 956 mm. Floods and mudslides were also reported throughout East Java and Bali. These facts and figures suggest that although few, if any, daily records were broken, this rainfall event can be considered to be an extreme event given its relatively long time, and large spatial, scale; certainly, the impacts were increased by the scales over which the heavy rainfall occurred. Exploring this large-scale atmospheric environment at the time of these floods, especially in relation to the intraseasonal and planetary-scale Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), is the subject of this paper. We will attempt to show that although the floods themselves could not be, and weren’t, predicted at a long (~1 to 3 weeks) lead time, the large-scale environment that was conducive to the floods, which was essentially controlled by the MJO, was.