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The Mississippi Delta covers about
10,000 kilometers square. It is very

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important for biodiversity. It is also
very important to protect the coast

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against sea level rise and also against
storm surges during hurricanes.

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We have noticed that since the 1930's 25%
of these marshes have been lost. We were

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able to estimate the rate of loss to be
equivalent to about one football field

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per hour. The only way to stop losing
that land is to first understand how we

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can build land rather than lose it, and
this way we can maybe do a better

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engineering of the coast and try to keep
all the sediments within the marshes

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rather than flushing it through the
ocean. We're trying to understand how

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much water, how much sediment, and how
much carbon is moving from I inside the

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continent of North America out into the
coastal ocean and then what happens to

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all of that stuff once it gets into the
ocean. We have three aircrafts with three

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different instruments on board flying
simultaneously, in addition to two boats

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underwater everybody at the same time
and we're going to do that at high tide

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as well as low tide. We're validating our
remote sensing measurements with these

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boat measurements from the field. The
UAVSAR we are using to look at the

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progression of the tides within the salt
marshes. With the system ASO which is a

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lidar we are trying to retrieve slope of
the rivers. So if we're able to estimate

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the slope of the rivers we can also
estimate the amount of water that is

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being discharged by those rivers. We have
a third instrument which is AVIRIS-NG

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that one is an imaging
spectrometer. It's basically looking at

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the water color it will be used to
estimate the amount of carbon and

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sediments within the water. The
spectrometer measures how much sunlight

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is being reflected off of the water but
it's not just the total amount of

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sunlight it breaks it down into
different colors of light and so we can

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use that information to help us
understand how much sediment is in the

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water, what kind of sediment, how much
carbon is in the

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water. We installed water level gauges
all along the river. They are basically

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little sensors that measure pressure.
With these gauges we'll be able to

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determine the slope of the river at any
given time we're recording the levels

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every five minutes. So when we go with
the airplane we can compare our airplane

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measurements, the remote sensing
measurements, with what these water level

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gauges are measuring. So we're trying to
capture if this river impacts the water level here.

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Okay. That one? Yes, this this one. That one okay.

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We're trying to develop techniques that relate the water
spectrum to the water quality. So we have

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to relate the observation to what's
actually in the water. For that we need

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water samples, and with these water
samples we can quantify the amount of

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carbon and sediments that are in there that
we can then compare with the remote

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sensing imagery. Okay lights started. There's nothing
like remote sensing because you can see

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instantaneously the entire landscapes in
one shot and we can do it multiple times

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and monitor the hydrology of the system
as a whole. So this will be very

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important for us to model these systems
and try to forecast what will happen in