Roughly one quarter of exposed land on the Northern Hemisphere and more than 65% of terrestrial area above 60°N are underlain by permafrost. Permafrost, defined as ground material which remains frozen for at least two consecutive years, stores around 1460–1600 billion tonnes of organic carbon, roughly twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The climate change driven degradation of permafrost has major implications for the environment and could potentially turn frozen ground from a carbon sink to a carbon source that consequently could cause trillions of dollars in global economic damage. A widespread process and linked to the degradation of permafrost is Arctic coastal erosion. Roughly 30–34% of coastlines on the Earth are affected by permafrost. Erosion processes of permafrost-coasts cause a release of carbon to the oceans, alter fish and wildlife habitats, force changes in the Arctic ecosystem and endanger human settlements and infrastructure. In order to fully assess the implications of eroding permafrost-coastlines, a continuous quantification of the erosion rates, the associated loss of permafrost and the stored carbon is required at high spatial resolution for the entire Arctic. In this context, spaceborne earth-observation is a suited tool to map and monitor changes of the Arctic coast remotely with high confidence; however, frequent cloud cover causes data gaps in optical imagery and thus limits the usability, repeatability, and transferability. In contrast, Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) imagery is capable of overcoming such limitations thanks to its ability to gather surface information independent of sun illumination or weather condition. Here we present a novel approach for the automated mapping of annual Arctic coastal erosion rates based on Sentinel-1 SAR scenes. The method employs deep learning and Change Vector Analyses (CVA). Results are presented for ten test sites across the Arctic covering about 1830 km of Arctic coastline. In a first step, a reference coastline for the year 2020 was computed via a deep learning workflow. Nine different U-Net architectures were combined to generate a high-quality coastline product which acted as a reference for the erosion-rate quantification. The U-Net architectures were pre-trained based on the ImageNet database (14. Mio images) and further trained with about 185.000 Sentinel-1 Pseudo-RGB scenes, which were generated from annual median and annual standard deviation VV/VH backscatter. Consequently, CVA was executed on these spatiotemporal metrics to estimate the erosion rates. On average, the standard deviation proved to be higher for water, whereas median backscatter was higher on land; thus, a change from high median backscatter to high standard deviation backscatter can be interpreted as a change from land to water. Furthermore, working on annual composites instead of single scenes significantly reduced the speckle effect and the geolocation uncertainty. Our analysis revealed erosion rates of up to 90 m/year for some areas across the investigated Arctic coastline. The approach can be applied for very large scales, prospectively even for the entire Arctic. Eventually, the generated products may act as a means to quantify the loss of frozen ground, the release of stored carbon stocks, and might be useful for further analyses related to changes in Arctic coastal environments.

Begun in 2019 in an effort to coordinate Committee on Earth Observation Satellite member agency efforts focused on coastal applications, COAST has launched 2 global pilots expected to roll-out regional demonstration products for users in 2022. The two pilots are Land 2 Sea and Sea 2 Land - referencing the impacts of seas on land through coastline changes, flooding and inundation and also the land’s impact on seas through nutrification and suspended sediment delivery. The initial regional demonstration areas are Bay of Bengal, W. Coast of Africa, La Plata Estuary, Chesapeake Bay, and two Small Island Nations in the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans - which were chosen based especially for stakeholder impact but also alignment with CEOS member agency priorities. COAST relies heavily on identified stakeholder input through the co-design/co-development process with the COAST teams. The benefits to stakeholders for participation in COAST include opportunities to customize products to suit their needs and to maximize functionality and ease of use, while CEOS member agencies attain valuable user engagement and potential in situ data-sharing which enhance data product quality. This presentation will provide an overview of CEOS COAST products, stakeholders and outreach activities, and also detail how interested stakeholders can become involved. We encourage you to explore other CEOS COAST posters and talks in this session that delve into the details of specific products and their development results to date. We conclude with a summary of the advancements COAST is expected to make through 2030 as an Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO) endorsed Contribution to the United Nations Decade of Ocean Observations for Sustainable Development.

Global and local communities recognize the heightened environmental susceptibility and human vulnerability of coastal zones to anthropogenic and natural forces, such as sea level rise, degraded water quality, storm surge, subsidence, and extreme weather. In response to these challenges, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Coastal Observations Applications Services and Tools (COAST) Ad Hoc Team, which formed in 2019, aims to build capacity for more robust support of coastal stakeholders and global sustainable development from end-to-end (observations to data to products to information to actionable knowledge).

The NASA DEVELOP National Program, part of NASA’s Applied Sciences Program, works in an overlapping space that focuses on workforce development. Over the past 23 years, the program has engaged numerous partner organizations in coastal communities across the United States and the globe to support decision-making in vulnerable coastal zones. The DEVELOP project model involves co-developing feasibility studies that apply NASA Earth observations and other data to address the concerns of partner organizations. DEVELOP projects are conducted by diverse, interdisciplinary teams of current students, recent graduates, and transitioning career professionals, who work with science advisors at NASA and partner organizations over the course of ten weeks to listen to the needs of partner organizations, explore the community’s concerns using Earth observations (EO) and related data, and deliver products, such as geospatial analyses and tools, that can help inform the partners decisions and future work. The DEVELOP model applies to a wide range of thematic projects and partner types, but all work centers around collaborative discovery and a shared passion for service.

Since 2019, when the CEOS COAST Ad Hoc Team formed, the NASA DEVELOP Program has conducted 18 related feasibility studies that fall within COAST’s thematic scope and support the initiative’s goal of connecting data to decisions. This represents about 10-15% of the DEVELOP program’s annual portfolio, which demonstrates the demand for data and tools that can aid coastal decision makers. These DEVELOP projects cover topics such as mapping shoreline delineation and change, characterizing water quality parameters, measuring health and extent of mangroves and coral reefs, mapping algal blooms and submerged aquatic vegetation, analyzing health and extent of wetlands and marshes, and quantifying turbidity and sediment transport in coastal zones. As a snapshot of the intersection between COAST’s global efforts and DEVELOP’s local initiatives, this abstract presents case studies from DEVELOP’s work in the context of COAST’s two pilot projects: “Sea to Land Impacts,” with a focus on physical forcing; and “Land to Sea Impacts,” which includes biological, biogeochemical, and ecological responses. Special focus will be given to DEVELOP’s impact on the user end of the value chain, which answers COAST and DEVELOP’s shared goal of leveraging EO for societal benefit.

As the interface between the terrestrial environment and open oceans, coastal waters encompass many unique habitats and serve important human needs. Coastal waters support many fish species and are important areas for the fisheries and shellfish industry. They also provide habitat for many other organisms such as marine mammals, corals, sea turtles, and submerged aquatic vegetation. This interface between the land and water is also important because a majority of the world's population inhabit coastal areas. These regions support dynamic interactions between the land, ocean, and atmosphere and account for about 15% of global ocean productivity, 90% of sediment-based mineralization, and 80% of organic matter (OM) burial. In order to track land-based sources of pollution and sediment distribution, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Coastal Observations Applications Services and Tools (COAST) ad hoc team is working to develop pilot projects on monitoring coastal eutrophication and sediment loading in regions around the world (e.g. the Bay of Bengal) using local in situ data, satellite-data products and cloud computing resources. The project will describe collaborations across space agencies and academic institutions to develop new indicators and visualization tools for tracking eutrophication and sedimentation. As an example, we will describe technology efforts to refine regional tuned eutrophication monitoring products for the Bay of Bengal using the Global Eutrophication Watch app designed by the Northwest Pacific Regional Environmental Cooperation Center, the Institute of Space-Earth Research at Nagayo University and Google. For sediment distribution, we will similarly describe currently available and emerging sediment products for the same Bay of Bengal region.