New Study Provides Insight – from Space – Into Sinking Land in Hampton Roads

Hampton Roads has experienced a steady and dramatic increase in tidal flooding over the last 90 years due to the combined effects of rising seas and sinking land – a process known as subsidence. In an effort to combat this, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) is injecting treated wastewater into the aquifer beneath Hampton Roads to apply upward pressure on natural land sinkage.

While much work has been done to understand sinking in the region, it has primarily relied on sparsely located GPS measurements. In 2017, a team of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Old Dominion University employed a state-of-the-art methodology that relies on radar satellites to measure the motion of the land surface with millimeter-scale accuracy. They discovered that land motion was not constant over the region. It could vary drastically over a few miles. However, the satellite data was only available between 2007-2011 and required many hours of manual processing.

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