Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission

The Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission was recommended in 2007 by the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey, “Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond”, for implementation by NASA. The SWOT mission is a partnership between two communities, the physical oceanography and the hydrology, to share high vertical accuracy and high spatial resolution topography data produced by the science payload, principally a Ka-band radar Interferometer (KaRIn). The SWOT payload also includes a precision orbit determination system consisting of GPS and DORIS receivers, a Laser Retro-reflector Assembly (LRA), a Jason-class nadir radar altimeter, and a JASON-class radiometer for tropospheric path delay corrections. The SWOT mission will provide large-scale data sets of ocean sea-surface height resolving scales of 15km and larger, allowing the characterization of ocean mesoscale and submesoscale circulation. The SWOT mission will also provide measurements of water storage changes in terrestrial surface water bodies and estimates of discharge in large (wider than 100m) rivers globally. The SWOT measurements will provide a key complement to other NASA spaceborne global measurements of the water cycle measurements by directly measuring the surface water (lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and wetlands) component of the water cycle. The SWOT mission is an international partnership between NASA and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is also expected to contribute to the mission. SWOT is currently nearing entry to Formulation (Phase A). Its launch is targeted for October 2020.