Five things to know about how the SWOT satellite will look at the world’s water

On Dec. 12, NASA will launch the Floor Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite into Earth orbit from Vandenberg Area Drive Base in California atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is a collaborative effort between NASA and the French space company Middle Nationwide d’Études Spatiales (CNES)—with contributions from the Canadian Area Company (CSA) and the U.Ok. Area Company—that can survey water on greater than 90% of the planet’s floor.

The satellite will measure the peak of water in Earth’s freshwater our bodies and the ocean, offering insights into how the ocean influences climate change; how a warming world impacts lakes, rivers, and reservoirs; and the way communities can higher put together for disasters, like floods.

Listed below are 5 ways in which SWOT will change what we find out about water on Earth:

1. SWOT will survey almost all water on Earth’s floor for the primary time

Water is important for all times on this planet. However it additionally performs a important function in storing and transferring a lot of the excess heat and carbon trapped in Earth’s environment by greenhouse gasoline emissions. It influences our climate and local weather as effectively. SWOT will assist researchers monitor Earth’s water funds—the place the water is as we speak, the place it is coming from, and the place it’ll be tomorrow. That is key to understanding how water sources are altering, what affect these adjustments can have on native environments, and the way the ocean reacts to and influences local weather change.

2. SWOT will see Earth’s water in greater definition than ever earlier than

The spacecraft’s science devices will view the planet’s freshwater our bodies and the ocean with unprecedented readability. SWOT will have the ability to acquire knowledge on ocean options lower than 60 miles (100 kilometers) throughout, serving to to enhance researchers’ understanding of the ocean’s function in local weather change. Earth’s seas have absorbed greater than 90% of the surplus warmth trapped within the environment by human-caused greenhouse gasoline emissions. Researchers assume that short-lived ocean options, equivalent to fronts and eddies, take in numerous that warmth—and the additional carbon that produced it.

By offering a high-definition view of freshwater our bodies, SWOT will assist generate a way more full image of Earth’s water funds. Many huge rivers stay a thriller to researchers, who cannot outfit them with monitoring devices for numerous causes, together with inaccessibility. The spacecraft’s devices will observe your complete size of almost all rivers wider than 330 ft (100 meters), viewing them in three dimensions for the primary time. Likewise, the place floor and satellite applied sciences presently present knowledge on just a few thousand of the world’s largest lakes, SWOT will broaden that quantity to over one million lakes bigger than 15 acres (62,500 sq. meters).

3. The satellite will deal with a number of the most urgent local weather change questions of our time

An essential a part of predicting our future climate is figuring out at what level the ocean slows down the absorption of extra warmth trapped within the environment and begins releasing it again into the air, the place it may speed up world warming. SWOT will present essential details about this world ocean-atmosphere warmth change, enabling researchers to check and enhance local weather forecasts. As well as, the satellite will assist fill gaps in researchers’ image of how sea stage is altering alongside coastlines, providing insights that may then be used to enhance pc fashions for sea stage rise projections and the forecasting of coastal floods.

4. SWOT knowledge will likely be used to tell choices about our day by day lives

Local weather change can be accelerating Earth’s water cycle, resulting in extra unstable precipitation patterns, together with torrential downpours and excessive droughts. Some communities around the globe will thus expertise floods whereas different endure droughts. SWOT knowledge will likely be used to observe drought situations in lakes and enhance flood forecasts for rivers, offering important data to water administration businesses, catastrophe preparedness businesses, universities, civil engineers, and others who want to trace water of their native areas.

5. This mission is paving the best way for future NASA Earth missions whereas additionally constructing on a long-standing worldwide partnership

With its progressive know-how and dedication to participating a various neighborhood of people that plan to make use of the mission’s knowledge, SWOT is laying a path for future Earth-observing missions. Measurements from SWOT—and the instruments to assist researchers in analyzing the knowledge—will likely be free and accessible. This may assist to foster analysis and functions actions by a variety of customers, together with those that might not normally have the chance to entry this data.

Such an bold mission is feasible due to a decades-long collaboration between NASA and CNES that began within the Eighties to observe Earth’s ocean. This partnership pioneered the usage of a space-based instrument known as an altimeter to check sea stage with the launch of the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite in 1992. The NASA-CNES partnership has continued uninterrupted for 3 many years and has expanded to embody work with different businesses, together with the CSA and the UK Area Company for SWOT, in addition to ESA (European Area Company), the European Group for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and the European Fee for the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which launched in November 2020.