Technology & equipment | Earth’s water bodies Mapping
Dr Paul S. Bell, from the National Oceanography Centre in the UK, gives an insight into a new satellite mission that will help engineers understand how global fresh water resources are being affected by both climate change and more direct human intervention
Below: Engineers integrate separate parts of the SWOT satellite into one in a Thales Alenia Space clean room facility in Cannes, France Image courtesy of NASA/JPL
SURFACE WATER AND OCEAN TOPOGRAPHY (SWOT) is a new satellite mission dedicated to mapping both ocean and fresh water levels at unprecedented resolution across the globe and is due for launch in late 2022. Teams from around the world, including the SWOT UK team which comprises scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre (NOC), the University of Bristol and Bangor University, will be involved in gathering data from instruments in and over the water at selected study locations to compare with and validate the SWOT measurements during the short and intense fast-sampling phase to ensure that the SWOT water-level products meet expectations. Satellite altimeters that measure the height of the earth’s surface from space have been around since the early 1990s, starting with the TOPEX/Poseidon mission, and have been invaluable for providing robust and consistent mapping of global sea level (and its rise) as well as annual and regional variations. The SWOT satellite brings a new dimension to such altimetry data with the ability to produce not only a line of measurements along the satellite’s ground track (the path on the ground beneath the satellite),
but also 2D maps of water level at resolutions as fine as 100m, in 60km swaths either side of the satellite. It does this using the Ka band Radar Interferometer system (KaRIn) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The SWOT mission brings together US and French oceanographers, hydrologists and international partners, who have joined forces to develop this satellite mission to make the first global survey of earth’s surface water, observe the fine details of the ocean’s surface topography, and measure how water bodies change over time. SWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and Centre National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA).
Mission alert SWOT was one of 15 missions listed in the 2007
National Research Council Decadal Survey of Earth Science missions that NASA should implement in the subsequent decade. It is finally due to be launched in early December 2022 via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
26 | November 2022 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
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