The Mississippi Delta covers about 10,000 kilometers square. It is very
important for biodiversity. It is also very important to protect the coast
against sea level rise and also against storm surges during hurricanes.
We have noticed that since the 1930's 25% of these marshes have been lost. We were
able to estimate the rate of loss to be equivalent to about one football field
per hour. The only way to stop losing that land is to first understand how we
can build land rather than lose it, and this way we can maybe do a better
engineering of the coast and try to keep all the sediments within the marshes
rather than flushing it through the ocean. We're trying to understand how
much water, how much sediment, and how much carbon is moving from I inside the
continent of North America out into the coastal ocean and then what happens to
all of that stuff once it gets into the ocean. We have three aircrafts with three
different instruments on board flying simultaneously, in addition to two boats
underwater everybody at the same time and we're going to do that at high tide
as well as low tide. We're validating our remote sensing measurements with these
boat measurements from the field. The UAVSAR we are using to look at the
progression of the tides within the salt marshes. With the system ASO which is a
lidar we are trying to retrieve slope of the rivers. So if we're able to estimate
the slope of the rivers we can also estimate the amount of water that is
being discharged by those rivers. We have a third instrument which is AVIRIS-NG
that one is an imaging spectrometer. It's basically looking at
the water color it will be used to estimate the amount of carbon and
sediments within the water. The spectrometer measures how much sunlight
is being reflected off of the water but it's not just the total amount of
sunlight it breaks it down into different colors of light and so we can
use that information to help us understand how much sediment is in the
water, what kind of sediment, how much carbon is in the
water. We installed water level gauges all along the river. They are basically
little sensors that measure pressure. With these gauges we'll be able to
determine the slope of the river at any given time we're recording the levels
every five minutes. So when we go with the airplane we can compare our airplane
measurements, the remote sensing measurements, with what these water level
gauges are measuring. So we're trying to capture if this river impacts the water level here.
Okay. That one? Yes, this this one. That one okay.
We're trying to develop techniques that relate the water spectrum to the water quality. So we have
to relate the observation to what's actually in the water. For that we need
water samples, and with these water samples we can quantify the amount of
carbon and sediments that are in there that we can then compare with the remote
sensing imagery. Okay lights started. There's nothing like remote sensing because you can see
instantaneously the entire landscapes in one shot and we can do it multiple times
and monitor the hydrology of the system as a whole. So this will be very
important for us to model these systems and try to forecast what will happen in
the future systems. Will they survived sea level rise? Will they survive the
next storm surge?