Two massive antennae will help keep track of how water moves around the world.
Dec 15, 2022, 10:20 PM UTCcalled the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, or SWOT, will launch into space on a SpaceX rocket. The satellite will take the first global survey of Earth’s freshwater systems from space, observing not only the oceans but also lakes, rivers, and coastal regions. It will be able to measure the height of water in these systems for the first time.
Understanding Earth’s water and how it moves is crucial for both modeling climate change over the long term and dealing with urgent events like floods and droughts. As these events are driven by global ocean currents and weather events, a global view is required to be able to understand them. Even the satellite itself is international. NASA collaborated with France’s space agency on SWOT, and Canada and the UK also worked on the satellite.
SWOT will focus on larger bodies of water. It will be able to monitor lakes that are larger than 15 acres and rivers wider than 330 feet. That will include millions of lakes and millions of miles of rivers around the globe, data on all of which will be publicly available. Currently, most rivers are monitored using ground-based gauges, which can take more regular readings but have disadvantages in that they are expensive to install and are not available in all locations.
Radar interferometry works by sending out two sets of radar signals, which bounce off the Earth and back to the transmitter, then analyzing the interference of these two signals. One of these signals is sent on a slightly longer path, so once the two pings arrive back at the detector, researchers can look at the difference between the two and use that information to precisely calculate distance. That allows researchers to see details about the depth of a body of water.
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