Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California used data from an airborne radar to measure the movement of the slow-moving landslides on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County. The analysis determined that, during a four-week period in the fall of 2024, land in the residential area slid toward the ocean by as much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) per week.
UAVSAR
On a changing planet, where phenomena like severe hurricanes, landslides, and wildfires are becoming more severe, scientists need data to assess and model disaster impacts and to potentially make predictions about hazards. NASA’s C-20A aircraft is a significant asset that can carry key instruments for understanding the science behind these phenomena.
Operating internationally over several countries this summer, NASA’S C-20A aircraft completed more than 150 hours of science flights across two months in support of Earth science research and overcame several challenges throughout its missions.
Following the eruption of the world’s largest active volcano, Mauna Loa, NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center deployed its C-20A aircraft to Kona, Hawaii, to gather images and data of the active lava flows for submission to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) by a team of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Parker, J., et al. (2021), California Institute of Technology. Earth and Space Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu, Earth and Space Science, 1, 11.
Liao, T.-H., et al. (2021), High-Resolution Soil-Moisture Maps Over Landslide Regions in Northern California Grassland Derived From SAR Backscattering Coefficients, IEEE Journal Of Selected Topics In Applied Earth Observations And Remote Sensing, 14, 4547-4560, doi:10.1109/JSTARS.2021.3069010.
Handwerger, A.L., et al. (2021), Inferring the Subsurface Geometry and Strength of Slow-Moving Landslides Using 3-D Velocity Measurements From the NASA/JPL UAVSAR, J. Geophys. Res., doi:https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JF005898.
While the agency's satellites image the wildfires from space, scientists are flying over burn areas, using smoke-penetrating technology to better understand the damage.
Earth-observing instruments on satellites and aircraft are mapping the current fires, providing data products to agencies on the ground that are responding to the emergency.
Lundgren, P., et al. (2017), Source model for the Copahue volcano magma plumbing system constrained by InSAR surface deformation observations, J. Geophys. Res., 122, doi:10.1002/2017JB014368.