Exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southern Louisiana, another major hurricane blew into the state.
Exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southern Louisiana, another major hurricane blew into the state. On August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida came ashore at Port Fourchon with sustained winds of 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour. The tide surged in some places up to 14 feet above sea level and slammed into marshes and swamps west of the Mississippi River, eroding soil and vegetation.
“Wetlands in southern Louisiana have taken a real beating from hurricanes in recent years,” said Chris Potter, an ecologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Although multiple natural and human-caused processes contribute to land loss along the coast, Potter has observed signatures of lasting storm damage after some of the strongest storms—especially Hurricanes Ida (2021) and Katrina (2005).
In a recent study, Potter documented wetland loss in Louisiana between 2000 and 2022 using data from the Landsat satellites. In 2021, Hurricane Ida was especially destructive to the marshlands and swamplands of Barataria Basin, just inland from Barataria Bay. The images above show Barataria Basin in September 2015 (left) compared to September 2021 (right), just after Hurricane Ida hit. Green vegetation in the wetlands around Little Lake turned to open water.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
