What Will SWOT Measure in World's Deltas and Estuaries?
Abstract
The Ka-band radar interferometer instrument (KaRIn) onboard SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) will provide global measurements of water surface elevation in rivers, lakes and oceans every 21 days during its 3 years lifetime. The SWOT calibration and validation (cal/val) period will occur during the first 90 days, during which the orbit will be repeated daily, albeit with limited geographical coverage. SWOT is planned for launch in the fall of 2021.
SWOT will generate an unprecedented set of measurements over coastal deltas and estuaries worldwide enabling spatially resolved measurements of hydrological processes across the land-sea continuum. Delta and estuarine regions are home to half a billion people worldwide, but are critically threatened by sea level rise and human activity. Mesoscale understanding of hydrological processes is needed to assess their vulnerability. What should we expect from SWOT about the 50 or so deltas and over 1300 estuaries worldwide? We present a statistical analysis of deltas and estuaries covered by SWOT's science and cal/val orbits. While most will be covered by the science orbit, a small subset will be covered during the cal/val orbit for opportunistic studies with daily measurements. We discuss current and potential plans for cal/val studies in these regions. Then, we demonstrate the measurement capabilities in deltas and estuaries based on airborne (AirSWOT and ASO) data collected in the Wax lake delta, Louisiana. These observations are compared to a hydrodynamic model implementation to calibrate its parameters. Finally, the model is used to simulate SWOT observations in a delta environment.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMOS51A..01S
- Keywords:
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- 1845 Limnology;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1856 River channels;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4520 Eddies and mesoscale processes;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICALDE: 4544 Internal and inertial waves;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL