Louisiana/Everglades wetland water level monitoring using satellite radar altimetry

Coastal estuaries, which connect coastal ocean, wetlands and coastal land region, play important roles in ecological environments. Wetlands typically occur in low-lying areas on the edges of lakes, and rivers, or in coastal areas protected from waves and are found in a variety of climates on every continent except Antarctica. Wetlands not only provide habitat for thousands of aquatic/terrestrial plant and animal species but also control floods by holding water much like a sponge by absorbing and reducing the velocity of storm-water. Human activities have so many negative impacts on wetlands and they became main contributing factors to the wetlands losses. For example, Louisiana's wetlands have lost more than 100 km2 of its area per year (Walker et al., 1987; Bourne, 2000). The loss of Louisiana wetlands as a result of ecological erosion or geological subsidence potentially have had significant impacts in slowing down storm surge from the devastating Hurricane Katrina. The ability to quantitatively measure accurate wetland water level changes in Louisiana has impacts on ecology and natural hazards mitigation including improved storm surge modeling resulting from hurricanes. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has been proven to be useful to measure centimeter-scale water level changes over Amazon flood plain and Everglades wetland using L-band SAR imagery. This is based on the fact that flooded forests permit double-bounce returns, which allow InSAR coherence to be maintained. Furthermore, ERS-1/2 C-band InSAR data have been used to demonstrate its feasibility to monitor water level changes over Louisiana wetlands. In addition, satellite radar altimetry has been used to measure inland water level variation over large river basins. In this study, we use the decadal (1992-2002) Topex/Poseidon (T/P) measurements from cycle 9 to 364 to detect water level changes of Louisiana's and Everglades' wetlands, where the water surfaces are calm or vegetated, causing irregular radar waveforms. Unlike all of the previous studies which spatially average 10-Hz data over a distance corresponding to the T/P track-water intersections, we employ 10-Hz regional land stackfile technique over the study area. As a result, we are able to measure distinct water level change over each 10-Hz stackfile bin, which has along-track ground spacing of ~600 m. We also demonstrate the feasibility of applying retracking corrections whereas previous studies considered radar returns from nominal tracking mode contained in geophysical data records (GDRs) adequate. Finally, we attempt a combination of the altimetry water level changes with the InSAR observed volumetric storage changes over several wetlands.