Land Subsidence Rate Estimates for the Mississippi River Delta

Coastal Louisiana's Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins are covered by this dataset of estimated land subsidence rates for 2021. It provides total subsidence calculated as the sum of deep and shallow vertical elevation change rates, derived from official state reports and interpolated data. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) produced these estimates as part of the Delta-X project, offering them as 30-meter resolution cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs.

Use Cases

• Modeling future wetland elevation and habitat loss by integrating subsidence rates with sea-level rise projections.
• Calibrating and validating hydrological or geomorphic models of the Mississippi River Delta using spatially explicit elevation change data.
• Informing coastal restoration and protection planning by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) with detailed subsidence maps.
• Assessing infrastructure risk in coastal Louisiana by analyzing localized rates of land sinking.

Strengths

• Data is derived from authoritative sources, specifically the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) of Louisiana's Phase-4 subsidence trend report and 2023 Coastal Master Plan data.
• Offers high spatial resolution at 30 meters (0.0003 decimal degrees) for detailed analysis of the Delta-X study area.
• Includes separate data layers for both the total subsidence rate and the estimated uncertainty in that rate, supporting error-aware analysis.

Limitations

• Key metadata conflicts exist: the 'last updated' date differs significantly between Data.gov (2026) and NASA Earthdata (2021), creating uncertainty about the dataset's currency.
• Core descriptive details like row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided on any platform.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Delta-X project, using data from the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) of Louisiana.

Collection Method

Total subsidence calculated as the sum of deep and shallow vertical elevation change rates. Deep rates from CPRA's Phase-4 report; shallow rates interpolated from CPRA's coast-wide data for the 2023 Coastal Master Plan.

Time Range

2021

Freshness

2026-03-13 03:10:17.810976

Geography

Delta-X domain area within the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins, a portion of the Mississippi River Delta in coastal Louisiana, USA.