On Sept. 29, 2009, an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck near American Samoa, Samoa, and Tonga, triggering a tsunami that caused human casualties and $200 million in property damage on the islands. The earthquake also exacerbated another problem in American Samoa: subsidence, or the sinking of land. When combined with relative sea level rise, land sinking can increase the frequency and amount of coastal flooding.
Protecting against flooding on islands requires reliable measurements of how much the ground is sinking and where, said Jeanne Sauber, a geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."You need to know in detail where the land is going down the fastest," she said. Sauber and several NASA colleagues are combining remote sensing tools to figure that out.
In the past, scientists had used data from two points of measurement on Tutuila: a GPS station and the island's one tide gauge. They typically coupled those points with satellite altimetry, which allows scientists to broadly monitor the surface height of the ocean. But these data provided only a limited picture.
"We knew how much the ground is deforming at this one point because of the GPS station there, but with the radar remote sensing technique, we can get a much denser map of what's going on across the island," said Stacey Huang, a fellow with NASA's Postdoctoral Program at NASA Goddard and the study's lead author.Synthetic aperture radar data is collected from planes or satellites.
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