What keeps a coastal wetland resilient?
Coastal resilience
I study how water, sediment, vegetation, sea-level rise, subsidence, and waves interact to determine whether deltas and wetlands persist or cross critical thresholds.
Earth System Scientist · Physical Oceanographer
Ali Reza
Payandeh
I study coasts as connected Earth systems, bringing together satellite observations, numerical models, and field measurements to understand the processes that shape them and how they respond to a changing climate.
ObserveModelPredict
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory · Pasadena, California
Explore my research
Can we predict a coast we cannot instrument?
Observation-driven prediction
I combine optical, lidar, and radar observations with process-based models to build transferable approaches for coastal systems where conventional measurements are sparse.
What moves across the land-ocean interface?
Land-ocean exchange
I investigate the pathways and timescales that move water and sediment across estuaries and wetlands, with emerging work extending this framework to coastal carbon transport.
Selected work
NASA Delta-X · Wetland resilience
Mississippi River Delta
Integrating airborne and satellite observations with hydrodynamic, sediment, and morphodynamic models to understand the processes that build and lose coastal land.
Mississippi River Delta model animation.NASA/JPL-Caltech ↗
Satellite-driven coastal modeling
Langebaan Lagoon, South Africa
Using ICESat-2, Sentinel-2, SWOT, global forcing, and a hydrodynamic model to build and test a coastal prediction framework without local in-situ measurements.
Simulated salinity dynamics in Langebaan Lagoon and Saldanha Bay.Payandeh et al., 2026 ↗
Coastal ocean dynamics
Southern California Bight
Using a decade of high-frequency radar observations to examine submesoscale eddies, their variability, and their connection to larger-scale ocean conditions.
Examples of submesoscale eddies identified from high-frequency radar surface currents.Payandeh et al., 2023 ↗
Mangrove estuaries · Land-ocean exchange
Buenaventura, Colombia
Developing an observation-driven model of a tropical mangrove estuary as a foundation for studying material transport from rivers and wetlands to the coastal ocean.
Hydrodynamic simulation of Buenaventura Bay.Payandeh · ongoing work ↗
Teaching & mentoring
From physical intuition to independent inquiry.
I want students to move comfortably between equations, code, observations, and the physical system itself. I use structured support early, then deliberately step it back as students learn to make scientific decisions on their own.
Selected publications
Google ScholarMulti-Sensor Airborne Remote Sensing for Calibrating Hydrodynamic and Sediment Transport Models in Coastal Louisiana Wetlands
Delta-X: An airborne remote sensing framework to calibrate hydrodynamic and ecogeomorphic processes responsible for land building in coastal deltas
A fully satellite-driven workflow for hydrodynamic modeling in data-scarce coastal systems
The Occurrence, Variability, and Potential Drivers of Submesoscale Eddies in the Southern California Bight
Tidal change in response to the relative sea level rise and marsh accretion in a tidally choked estuary
Suspended sediment dynamics in a deltaic estuary controlled by subtidal motion and offshore river plumes
Wave dynamics near Barataria Bay tidal inlets during spring-summer time
Subtidal Water Level and Current Variability in a Bar-Built Estuary During Cold Front Season: Barataria Bay, Gulf of Mexico
Numerical modeling of pollutant load accumulation in the Musa Estuary, Persian Gulf
Selected talks & presentations
Remote Sensing-Based Hydrodynamic Modeling in Data-Scarce Regions
Predicting Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana: A Coupled Hydrodynamic and Morphology Model Integrating Remote Sensing Data
A Decadal Analysis of Submesoscale Eddies in the Southern California Bight Through High-Frequency Radar Observations
Submesoscale Eddies in the Southern California Bight Derived from a Decade of High Frequency Radar Observations
Low Frequency Sea Level Variability in a Deltaic Mississippi River Estuary during Cold Front Season
Science beyond the lab
Clear science should travel.
I care about communicating science outside a specialty, from public conversations about ocean and climate science to my work with Zharfa, a Persian-language podcast and media project.
Zharfa Podcast · Persian
Visit Zharfa on YouTube Episode 9: Human extinction, climate change, and sea-level rise.