The NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission: Status and Hydrologic Science Contributions
Launched in December 2022, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission houses a first-of-its-kind satellite instrument, KaRin, with an interferometric Ka-band active radar and a near-nadir look angle. Most importantly, SWOT's KaRin instrument measures coincident water surface elevation, slopes and widths at high precision, and over a large 120 km swath every 10 days on average, enabling estimation of volume change in waterbodies and discharge in rivers. SWOT measures 0.5% earth’s surface area per hour and offers new insights into ocean and inland waterbodies. Less well known are SWOT’s capabilities for rivers, particularly rivers that are otherwise difficult to sample with field equipment. Using SWOT and field data, this presentation will discuss the hydrologic and geomorphic implications of one and a half years of SWOT measurements, including data from rivers, lakes and reservoirs in Western North America.