NASA Data Supports Everglades Restoration

This story is the second installment of a series on NASA’s mission to measure greenhouse gases in Florida’s mangrove ecosystem. Read the first part here.

Along the southernmost rim of the Florida Peninsula, the arching prop roots of red mangroves line the coast. Where they dip below the water’s surface, fish lay their eggs, using the protection from predators that the trees provide. Among their branches, wading birds like the great blue heron and the roseate spoonbill find rookeries to rear their young. The tangled matrix of roots collects organic matter and ocean-bound sediments, adding little by little to the coastline and shielding inland biology from the erosive force of the sea.

In these ways, mangroves are equal parts products and engineers of their environment. But their ecological value extends far beyond the coastline. 

Tropical wetlands absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere with impressive efficiency. Current estimates suggest they sequester carbon dioxide 10 times faster and store up to five times more carbon than old-growth forests. But as part of the ever-changing line between land and sea, coastal wetlands are vulnerable to disturbances like sea level rise, hurricanes, and changes in ocean salinity. As these threats intensify, Florida’s wetlands — and their role as a critical sink for carbon dioxide — face an uncertain future.

A new data product developed by NASA-funded researchers will help monitor from space the changing relationship between coastal wetlands and atmospheric carbon. It will deliver daily measurements of gaseous flux — the rate at which gas is exchanged between the planet’s surface and atmosphere. The goal is to improve local and global estimates of carbon dioxide levels and help stakeholders evaluate wetland restoration efforts.

NASA measures carbon dioxide from ground, air and space

In the Everglades, flux measurements have historically relied on data from a handful of “flux towers.” The first of these towers was erected in June 2003, not far from the edge of Shark River at a research site known as SRS-6. A short walk from the riverbank, across a snaking path of rain-weathered, wooden planks, sits a small platform where the tower is anchored to the forest floor. Nearly 65 feet above the platform, a suite of instruments continuously measures wind velocity, temperature, humidity, and concentrations of atmospheric gases. These measurements are used to quantify the amount of carbon dioxide that wetland vegetation removes from the atmosphere — and the amount of methane released.

“Hundreds of research papers have come from this site,” said David Lagomasino, a professor of coastal ecology at East Carolina University. The abundance of research born from SRS-6 underscores its scientific value. But the BlueFlux campaign is committed to detailing flux across a much larger area — to fill in the gaps between the towers.

Part of NASA’s new greenhouse-gas product is a machine-learning model that estimates gaseous flux using observations made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. The MODIS instruments capture images and data of South Florida every one to two days, measuring the wavelength of sunlight reflected by the planet’s surface to produce a dataset called surface spectral reflectance.

Different surfaces — like water, vegetation, sand, or decaying organic matter — reflect different wavelengths of light. With the help of some advanced statistical algorithms, modelers can use these measurements to generate a grid of real-time flux data.

To help ensure the satellite-based model is making accurate predictions, researchers compare its outputs to measurements made on the ground. But with only a handful of flux towers in the region, ground-based flux data can be hard to come by.

To augment existing datasets, NASA researchers use a relatively new airborne technique for measuring flux. Since April 2022, NASA’s airborne science team has conducted 34 flights equipped with a payload known colloquially as “CARAFE,” short for the CARbon Airborne Flux Experiment. The CARAFE instrument measures concentrations of methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor, generating readings that researchers combine with information about the plane’s speed and orientation to estimate rates of gaseous flux at fixed points along each flight’s path.

“This is one of the first times an instrument like this has flown over a mangrove forest anywhere in the world,” said Lola Fatoyinbo, a forest ecologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Early findings from space-based flux data confirm that, in addition to acting as a sink of carbon dioxide, tropical wetlands are a significant source of methane — a greenhouse gas that traps heat roughly 80 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. In fact, researchers estimate that Florida’s entire wetland expanse produces enough methane to offset the benefits of wetland carbon removal by about 5%.

“There are also significant differences in fluxes between healthy mangroves and degraded ones,” Fatoyinbo said. In areas where mangrove forests are suffering, say after a major hurricane, “you end up with more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” As wetland ecology responds to intensifying natural and human pressures, the data product will help researchers precisely monitor the impact of ecological changes on global carbon dioxide and methane levels.

‘We need this reliable science’

The Everglades today are roughly half their original size — primarily the result of a century’s worth of uninterrupted land development and wetland drainage projects. It’s difficult to quantify the impact of wetland losses at this scale. Florida’s tropical wetlands aren’t just an important reminder of the beauty and richness of the state’s natural history. They’re also a critical reservoir of atmospheric carbon and a source of drinking water for millions of South Florida residents.

“We know how valuable the wetlands are, but we need this reliable science to help translate their benefits into something that can reach people and policymakers,” said Steve Davis, chief science officer for the Everglades Foundation, a non-profit organization in Miami-Dade County that provides scientific research and advocacy in an effort to protect and restore the Everglades.

As new policies and infrastructure are designed to support Everglades restoration, researchers hope NASA’s daily flux product will help local officials evaluate their restoration efforts in real time — and adjust the course as needed.

The prototype of the product, called Daily Flux Predictions for South Florida, is slated for release this year and will be available through NASA’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC).

By Nathan Marder

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

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Hubble Sees a Spiral and a Star

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling spiral galaxy paired with a prominent star, both in the constellation Virgo. While the galaxy and the star appear to be close to one another, even overlapping, they’re actually a great distance apart. The star, marked with four long diffraction spikes, is in our own galaxy. It’s just 7,109 light-years away from Earth. The galaxy, named NGC 4900, lies about 45 million light-years from Earth.

This image combines data from two of Hubble’s instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed in 2002 and still in operation today, and the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which was in use from 1993 to 2009. The data used here were taken more than 20 years apart for two different observing programs — a real testament to Hubble’s long scientific lifetime!

Both programs aimed to understand the demise of massive stars. In one, researchers studied the sites of past supernovae, aiming to estimate the masses of the stars that exploded and investigate how supernovae interact with their surroundings. They selected NGC 4900 for the study because it hosted a supernova named SN 1999br.

In the other program, researchers laid the groundwork for studying future supernovae by collecting images of more than 150 nearby galaxies. When researchers detect a supernova in one of these galaxies, they can refer to these images, examining the star at the location of the supernova. Identifying a supernova progenitor star in pre-explosion images gives valuable information about how, when, and why supernovae occur.

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

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Navigating a Slanted River

Written by Denise Buckner, student collaborator at University of Florida 

Perseverance is hard at work on Mars, overcoming obstacles for scientific exploration! Just a few sols after successfully sealing the challenging Green Gardens core, Perseverance roved on to the Broom Point workspace to collect another sample called Main River. Broom Point is situated a few hundred meters down-slope from where Green Gardens was collected, and the Science Team chose to explore this area because orbiter images show some intriguing, alternating light and dark layers.

Upon reaching the workspace, images captured by Perseverance confirm that these distinct layers are visible on the ground, as well. Layers are interesting because they record different geological events that occurred in the planet’s past, which may include deposition of sediments, lava flows, or volcanic ash. By conducting proximity science with rover instruments and collecting a core to return to Earth for future analyses, the team is investigating what this material is composed of and how it was emplaced. 

When the team is planning to collect a sample from an outcrop, the first step is to abrade the rock, grinding away the top few millimeters and smoothing out the surface so the SHERLOC and PIXL instruments can move in and conduct their scans. Although Perseverance has abraded more than 30 rocks across Jezero crater, new rocks still present unique challenges. While abrading the Slants River target at Broom Point, the rock unexpectedly fractured, resulting in an uneven surface. SHERLOC and PIXL require just a few millimeters of clearance to safely approach the rock, and while PIXL was able to reach the broken surface, the topography looked a little more dicey for SHERLOC.

The team’s engineers and rover planners took stock of the situation and decided to use WATSON, SHERLOC’s companion camera, to snap some images of the abrasion patch from another angle. These images built a surface model of the small cracks and crevices, and with this knowledge in hand, the team found a way to safely maneuver the instrument to the same spot that PIXL scanned, and collected a co-located spectroscopy map. Once this abrasion proximity science was completed, the rover went on to drill and seal the Main River core, an activity that went off without a hitch.

With another core in the bag, Perseverance is off to the next workspace, ready to tackle whatever challenges may lie ahead!

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NASA Researchers Study Coastal Wetlands, Champions of Carbon Capture

8 Min Read

NASA Researchers Study Coastal Wetlands, Champions of Carbon Capture

Across the street from the Flamingo Visitor’s Center at the foot of Florida’s Everglades National Park, there was once a thriving mangrove population — part of the largest stand of mangroves in the Western Hemisphere. Now, the skeletal remains of the trees form one of the Everglades’ largest ghost forests.

When Hurricane Irma made landfall in September 2017 as a category 4 storm, violent winds battered the shore and a storm surge swept across the coast, decimating large swaths of mangrove forest. Seven years later, most of the mangroves here haven’t seen any new growth. “At this point, I doubt they’ll recover,” said David Lagomasino, a professor of coastal studies at East Carolina University.

Lagomasino was in the Everglades conducting fieldwork as part of NASA’s BlueFlux Campaign, a three-year project that aims to study how sub-tropical wetlands influence atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. Both gases absorb solar radiation and have a warming effect on Earth’s atmosphere.

The campaign is led by Ben Poulter, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies the way human activity and climate change affect the carbon cycle. As wetland vegetation responds to increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and severe weather, Poulter’s team is trying to determine how much carbon dioxide wetland vegetation removes from the atmosphere and how much methane it produces. Ultimately this research will help scientists develop models to estimate and monitor greenhouse gas concentrations in coastal areas around the globe.

Although coastal wetlands account for less than 2% of the planet’s land-surface area, they remove a significant amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Florida’s coastal wetlands alone remove an estimated 31.8 million metric tons each year. A commercial aircraft would have to circle the globe more than 26,000 times to produce the same amount of carbon dioxide. Coastal wetlands also store carbon in marine sediments, keeping it underground — and out of the atmosphere — for thousands of years. This carbon storage capacity of oceans and wetlands is so robust that it has its own name: blue carbon.

“We’re worried about losing that stored carbon,” Poulter said. “But blue carbon also offers tremendous opportunities for climate mitigation if conservation and restoration are properly supported by science.”

The one-meter core samples collected by Lagomasino will be used to identify historic rates of blue carbon development in mangrove forests and to evaluate how rates of carbon storage respond to specific environmental pressures, like sea level rise or the increasing frequency of tropical cyclones.

Early findings from space-based flux data confirm that, in addition to acting as a sink of carbon dioxide, tropical wetlands are a significant source of methane — a greenhouse gas that traps heat roughly 80 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. In fact, researchers estimate that Florida’s entire wetland expanse produces enough methane to offset the benefits of wetland carbon removal by about 5%.

Everglades peat contains history of captured carbon

During his most recent fieldwork deployment, Lagomasino used a small skiff to taxi from one research site to the next; many parts of the Everglades are virtually unreachable on foot. At each site, he opened a broad, black case and removed a metallic peat auger, which resembles a giant letter opener. The instrument is designed to extract core samples from soft soils. Everglades peat — which is composed almost entirely of the carbon-rich, partially decomposed roots, stems, and leaves of mangroves — offers a perfect study subject.

Lagomasino plunged the auger into the soil, using his body weight to push the instrument into the ground. Once the sample was secured, he freed the tool from the Earth, presenting a half-cylinder of soil. Each sample was sealed and shipped back to the lab — where they are sliced horizontally into flat discs and analyzed for their age and carbon content.

Everglades peat forms quickly. In Florida’s mangrove forests, around 2 to 10 millimeters of soil are added to the forest floor each year, building up over time like sand filling an hourglass. Much like an ice core, sediment cores offer a window into Earth’s past. The deeper the core, the further into the past one can see. By looking closely at the contents of the soil, researchers can uncover information about the climate conditions from the time the soil formed.

In some parts of the Everglades, soil deposits can reach depths of up to 3 meters (10 feet), where one meter might represent close to 100 years of peat accumulation, Lagomasino said. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, by comparison, a similarly sized, one-meter deposit could take more than 1,000 years to develop. This is important in the context of restoration efforts: in coastal wetlands, peat losses can be restored up to 10 times faster than they might be in other forest types.

“There are also significant differences in fluxes between healthy mangroves and degraded ones,” said Lola Fatoyinbo, a research scientist in the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In areas where mangrove forests are suffering, for example, after a major hurricane, “you end up with more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” she said. As wetland ecology responds to intensifying natural and human pressures, the data product will help researchers precisely monitor the impact of ecological changes on global carbon dioxide and methane levels.

Wetland methane: A naturally occurring but potent greenhouse gas

Methane is naturally produced by microbes that live in wetland soils. But as wetland conditions change, the growth rate of methane-producing microbes can spike, releasing the gas into the atmosphere at prodigious rates.

Since methane is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, possessing a warming potential 84 times greater over a 25-year period, methane emissions undermine some of the beneficial services that blue carbon ecosystems provide as natural sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide.

While Lagomasino studied the soil to understand long-term storage of greenhouse gases, Lola Fatoyinbo, a research scientist in NASA’s Biospheric Sciences Lab, and Peter Raymond, an ecologist at Yale University’s School of the Environment, measured the rate at which these gases are exchanged between wetland vegetation and the atmosphere. This metric is known as gaseous flux.

The scientists measure flux using chambers designed to adhere neatly to points where significant rates of gas exchange occur. They secure box-like chambers to above-ground roots and branches while domed chambers measure gas escaping from the forest floor. The concentration of gases trapped in each chamber is measured over time.

In general, as the health of wetland ecology declines, less carbon dioxide is removed, and more methane is released. But the exact nature of the relationship between wetland health and gaseous flux is not well understood. What does flux look like in ghost forests, for example? And how do more subtle changes in variables like canopy coverage or species distribution influence levels of carbon dioxide sequestration or methane production?

“We’re especially interested in the methane part,” Fatoyinbo said. “It’s the least understood, and there’s a lot more of it than we previously thought.”

Based on data collected during BlueFlux fieldwork, “we’re finding that coastal wetlands remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide and produce substantial amounts of methane,” Poulter said. “But overall, these ecosystems appear to provide a net climate benefit, removing more greenhouse gases than they produce.” That could change as Florida’s wetlands respond to continued climate disturbances.

The future of South Florida’s ecology

Florida’s wetlands are roughly 5,000 years old. But in just the past century, more than half of the state’s original wetland coverage has been lost as vegetation was cleared and water was drained to accommodate the growing population. The Everglades system now contains 65% less peat and 77% less stored carbon than it did prior to drainage. The future of the ecosystem — which is not only an important reservoir for atmospheric carbon, but a source of drinking water for more than 7 million Floridians and a home to flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth — is uncertain.

Scientists who have dedicated their careers to understanding and restoring South Florida’s ecology are hopeful. “Nature and people can coexist,” said Meenakshi Chabba, an ecologist and resilience scientist at the Everglades Foundation in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. “But we need good science and good management to reach that goal.”

The next step for NASA’s BlueFlux campaign is the development of a satellite-based data product that can help regional stakeholders evaluate in real-time how Florida’s wetlands are responding to restoration efforts designed to protect one of the state’s most precious natural resources — and all those who depend on it.

By Nathan Marder

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

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NASA Analysis Shows Unexpected Amount of Sea Level Rise in 2024

Last year’s increase was due to an unusual amount of ocean warming, combined with meltwater from land-based ice such as glaciers.

Global sea level rose faster than expected in 2024, mostly because of ocean water expanding as it warms, or thermal expansion. According to a NASA-led analysis, last year’s rate of rise was 0.23 inches (0.59 centimeters) per year, compared to the expected rate of 0.17 inches (0.43 centimeters) per year.

“The rise we saw in 2024 was higher than we expected,” said Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Every year is a little bit different, but what’s clear is that the ocean continues to rise, and the rate of rise is getting faster and faster.”

In recent years, about two-thirds of sea level rise was from the addition of water from land into the ocean by melting ice sheets and glaciers. About a third came from thermal expansion of seawater. But in 2024, those contributions flipped, with two-thirds of sea level rise coming from thermal expansion.

“With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth’s expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Since the satellite record of ocean height began in 1993, the rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled. In total, global sea level has gone up by 4 inches (10 centimeters) since 1993.

This long-term record is made possible by an uninterrupted series of ocean-observing satellites starting with TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992. The current ocean-observing satellite in that series, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, launched in 2020 and is one of an identical pair of spacecraft that will carry this sea level dataset into its fourth decade. Its twin, the upcoming Sentinel-6B satellite, will continue to measure sea surface height down to a few centimeters for about 90% of the world’s oceans.

Mixing It Up

There are several ways in which heat makes its way into the ocean, resulting in the thermal expansion of water. Normally, seawater arranges itself into layers determined by water temperature and density. Warmer water floats on top of and is lighter than cooler water, which is denser. In most places, heat from the surface moves very slowly through these layers down into the deep ocean.

But extremely windy areas of the ocean can agitate the layers enough to result in vertical mixing. Very large currents, like those found in the Southern Ocean, can tilt ocean layers, allowing surface waters to more easily slip down deep.

The massive movement of water during El Niño — in which a large pool of warm water normally located in the western Pacific Ocean sloshes over to the central and eastern Pacific — can also result in vertical movement of heat within the ocean.

Learn more about sea level:

https://sealevel.nasa.gov

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov

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Anthony Greicius