UAVSAR Gridded Water Channel Estimates for Mississippi River Delta

Delta-X UAVSAR L3 data provides gridded estimates of open water channels for the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins in Louisiana's Mississippi River Delta. The dataset was generated from Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) Level 1B interferometric products acquired during Spring and Fall 2021 deployments, offering a spatial resolution of approximately 6 meters. These cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs are produced by ORNL_CLOUD and hosted on NASA Earth Data and Data.gov platforms.

Use Cases

• Defining open water flow paths for hydrodynamic modeling of the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins.
• Evaluating the performance of hydrological models against high-resolution observed channel data.
• Analyzing seasonal changes in channel networks between Spring and Fall 2021 deployments.
• Studying narrow water channels as narrow as 10 meters using L-band polarimetric SAR data.

Strengths

• High spatial resolution of approximately 6 meters enables detection of narrow water channels.
• Data captures seasonal variations from both Spring and Fall 2021 Delta-X campaign deployments.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earth Data and Data.gov indicates institutional validation and importance.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are unavailable across all sources.
• Conflicting last updated dates exist between platforms (2021-09-13 and 2026-03 13).
• License is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without clear terms.

Provenance

Source

ORNL_CLOUD / NASA UAVSAR on Gulfstream-III aircraft.

Collection Method

Generated from UAVSAR Level 1B interferometric products in radar coordinates.

Time Range

2021 (Spring and Fall deployments)

Freshness

2026-03-13 03:16:27.110047

Geography

Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins, Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana, U.S.A.