KATC StormTeam 3 Weather BLOG

On this Earth Day I wanted to show you a gorgeous picture of our state that was taken earlier this month by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on April 7, 2009.  This image highlights the interaction between our coast and the Gulf of Mexico and the sediment that empties into the Gulf from the Pearl, the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, Mermentau, Calacasieu and Sabine Rivers.  It shows how the turbid river water interacts with the Gulf as their sediments swirl westward.  This sediment has been flowing into the Gulf for tens of thousands of years which has built our land and wetlands.  But over the last 150 years we (us humans) have built many channels, canals and outlets to mitigate flooding and improve navigability but at the cost of increased erosion in many areas.  Add to that recent hurricanes, which have inundated many of our wetlands with salt water (you can still see the browned/burned areas from the Upper Texas coast through all of SE Louisiana) and our coastline continues to die and recede at an alarming rate.  This picture highlights the fragility of our coast and why we must make every effort to conserve it as it’s the only buffer between us and topical storm surges.  Adding to the problem, subsidence of our coastal land-it has sunk anywhere from 1-3ft over the last 80 years, and that global sea level rise will continue, even if just a little bit, we are precariously exposed to Mother Nature’s wrath…all politics and global climate change views aside…we must conserve our coast.  Rob