The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the release of the datasets from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) 2019-2020 Prelaunch Oceanography Field Campaign. The campaign was designed to test the performance of several in-situ instruments/platforms in meeting the SWOT Sea Surface Height (SSH) Calibration/Validation (CalVal) requirement, and conducted near the SWOT CalVal crossover location, about 300 kilometers west of Monterey, California, between September, 2019 and January, 2020. The instrumentation includes three moorings with different designs, one Slocum glider, one bottom pressure recorder, one Pressure-Inverted-Echo-Sounder (PIES) and a Global Position System (GPS) on one of the moorings. The three moorings were placed along a Sentinel-3A ground track separated by 10 and 20 km distance with a focus on small mesoscales. The datasets in this release include hydrographic temperature and conductivity measurements at recorded pressure levels, bottom pressure at the sea floor and GPS SSH from a surface buoy.

Datasets included in this release are listed below with their digital object identifiers, which redirect to the corresponding dataset pages on the PO.DAAC Web Portal. A user guide that describes the field campaign and the in-situ measurements is linked on the Documentation tab of each dataset landing page.

NOAA Bottom Pressure Recorders (BPR):
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-BPR01

Rutgers Slocum Gliders:
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-GLID1

JPL Global Positioning Systems (GPS):
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-GPS01

SIO Pressure-sensing Inverted Echo Sounder (PIES):
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-PIES1

NOAA Prawlers:
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-PRAW1

SIO Moored Fixed-Depth CTDs:
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-CTD01

WHOI/NOAA Moored Fixed-Depth CTDs:
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-CTD11

SIO Mooring WireWalker (WW):
https://doi.org/10.5067/SWTPR-WW001

Download (example)

Download WW data using podaac-data-downloader (installation guide)

podaac-data-downloader -c SWOT_PRELAUNCH_L2_WW_V1 -d ./SWOT_PRELAUNCH_L2_WW_V1 --start-date 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z --end-date 2020-12-31T00:00:00Z

Citation

Citation guidelines are given on the Citation tab of the landing page for each dataset. An example is given below.

SWOT pre-launch field campaign, 2020; GPS sea surface height, Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) data from the 2019-2020 SWOT pre-launch field campaign. Ver. 2.0. PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Dataset accessed [YYYY-MM-DD] at https ://doi.org/10.5067/<DOI Suffix>

Reference

Wang, J., Fu, L., Haines, B., Lankhorst, M., Lucas, A. J., Farrar, J. T., Send, U., Meinig, C., Schofield, O., Ray, R., Archer, M., Aragon, D., Bigorre, S., Chao, Y., Kerfoot, J., Pinkel, R., Sandwell, D., & Stalin, S. 2022: On the Development of SWOT In Situ Calibration/Validation for Short-Wavelength Ocean Topography. J Atmos Ocean Tech, 39, 595–617, https://doi.org/10.1175/jtech-d-21-0039.1.

Comments/Questions? Please contact podaac@podaac.jpl.nasa.gov or visit the PO.DAAC Forum.