UAVSAR Water Level Change Maps for Mississippi River Delta Wetlands

L-band radar data from the Delta-X campaign provides water level change maps for the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne Basins in Louisiana. Three gridded products—temporalcoherence, waterlevelchange, and waterlevelchange_ramp—detail cumulative changes in centimeters at 30-minute intervals during spring and fall 2021 deployments. NASA's UAVSAR instrument on a Gulfstream-III aircraft collected these observations, which were validated against in-situ water level gauges.

Use Cases

• Modeling tidal and riverine influence on wetland water levels using the centimeter-scale waterlevelchange grids.
• Assessing phase unwrapping reliability for InSAR processing via the temporalcoherence quality index.
• Removing spatially linear trends from water elevation estimates using the waterlevelchange_ramp product.
• Validating satellite-derived water level products with airborne L-band radar data collected at high temporal resolution.

Strengths

• Data quality was assessed by comparison with in situ water level gauges throughout the study area.
• Products include a temporalcoherence index (0 to 1) specifically measuring phase unwrapping quality.
• Observations cover two distinct seasonal deployments in spring (March-April) and fall (September) 2021.
• A series of quality assurance masks for tropospheric delay were generated for all SAR acquisition dates.

Limitations

• Specific row counts, file sizes, and detailed column names are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date, listing both 2021-09-13 and 2026-03 13.

Provenance

Source

NASA Delta-X campaign, Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) on Gulfstream-III aircraft.

Collection Method

Georeferenced InSAR-derived maps from phase unwrapping corrected interferograms for nearest-neighbor flight pairs.

Time Range

2021-03-27 to 2021-04-18 and 2021-09 -03 to 2021-09-13

Freshness

2026-03-13 03:16:27.093634

Geography

Atchafalaya and Terrebonne Basins, Southern Louisiana, USA, within the Mississippi River Delta.