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The SWOT mission will last at least three years and will provide researchers with multiple assessments of Earth’s water resources, allowing them to better monitor seasonal changes and significant weather conditions in the planet’s rivers and lakes. In this way, it can indicate areas that are vulnerable to human activity and climate change.
Recently, SWOT’s Ka-band Radar Interferometer Instrument (CARIN) probed the height of water features on Long Island – New York State, US – as bright pink spots in one of the mission’s first images. Different heights of the earth are represented by purple, yellow, green and blue colors.
Water features on New York’s Long Island – visible as bright pink spots. Shades of purple, yellow, green and dark blue represent the different elevations of the land, while the surrounding ocean is light blue.
“[It’s like] “Taking the pulse of the world’s water system, we can see when it’s racing, and we can see when it’s lagging,” Pavelski said recently. The guard.
Overall, “SWOT helps us understand how much sea level rise on our coasts will change, how the amount of water stored in reservoirs around the world will change (and to some extent how those reservoirs function), and how water flows will change. The water between rivers changes over time.” It changes,” Pavelski said IE.
SWOT will first operate on the California coast
“The first bodies of water we look at with SWOT are carefully selected to help us understand how well the SWOT data works,” he said.
“During the first six months of SWOT, we will have teams in the field collecting data on the ground in rivers and lakes around the world.”
Pavelski notes that oceanographers collect data at critical locations in the ocean (such as the California coast, the Gulf Stream in the eastern United States, and the Mediterranean). “We use the data collected to understand SWOT’s performance,” he said.
In addition to ground-based observations, measurements are compared with other satellite missions. In this way, scientists can create global maps like never before.
Once fully operational, the goal is to SWOT analyze 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) of rivers, as well as millions of nearshore and coastal lakes that are difficult to sample.
NASA also wants to make the data available to the public with user-friendly tools to encourage communities to use the data to plan and monitor local water levels.
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