Delta-X: UAVSAR L3 Gridded Open Water Channels, MRD, Louisiana, USA, 2021

This dataset provides gridded estimates of water channels for the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins of the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana, U.S.A. The data show channels with open water that are as narrow as 10 m. These channel estimates were generated from the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) Level 1B interferometric products in radar coordinates acquired in the Spring and Fall Delta-X deployments of 2021, which have a spatial resolution of approximately 6 m. UAVSAR is a polarimetric L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) flown on the NASA Gulfstream-3 aircraft. There are two water channel products, one covering the Atchafalaya basin and the western edge of the Terrebonne basin, and another that primarily covers the Terrebonne basin with some overlap with the eastern edge of the Atchafalaya basin. The two files are provided in cloud-optimized GeoTIFF format. The channel estimates can be used to define open water paths in hydrodynamic models and to evaluate model performance.