The Delta-X mission seeks to answer this science question: What are the hydrological and ecological processes responsible for the resilience and vulnerability of river deltas to Relative Sea Level Rise (RSLR), and what are their relative contributions to soil elevation?
The mission’s objectives are to evaluate the roles of:
1. Vegetation on soil accretion rates
2. Channel-network density and deltaic island size on soil accretion rates
Teams are headed out by land, water, and air to collect data that will be used to forecast land gain and loss in the Mississippi River Delta as a result of sea level rise.
Delta-X, a new NASA airborne investigation, is preparing to embark on its first field campaign in the Mississippi River Delta in coastal Louisiana. Beginning in April, the Delta-X science team, led by Principal Investigator Marc Simard of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will be collecting data by air and by boat to better understand why some parts of the delta are disappearing due to sea-level rise while other parts are not.
NASA is sending five airborne campaigns across the United States in 2020 to investigate fundamental processes that ultimately impact human lives and the environment, from snowstorms along the East Coast to ocean eddies off the coast of San Francisco.
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