The PO.DAAC is pleased to announce the release of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Simulated North American Continent Hydrology Datasets. This release provides simulated water surface elevation products that resemble the data to be derived from SWOT Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) measurements. The data were generated using the CNES (French National Centre for Space Studies) SWOT Hydrology Toolbox. These simulated datasets are intended to help users become familiar with SWOT data products and associated PODAAC tools. They should not be used as any indication of actual in-flight performance of SWOT data.

Datasets in this release include Geolocated elevations (latitude, longitude, and height), Classification mask (water/land flags, and water fraction), Surface areas (projected pixel area on the ground), as well as Rasterized water surface elevation and inundation extent data at resolutions of 100 m and 250 m in a Universal Transverse Mercator projection grid. This release also includes simulated river data consisting of shapefiles of river reaches (approximately 10 km long) and river nodes (approximately 200 m spacing) identified in the Prior River Database (PRD), simulated lake data consisting of shapefiles of lakes identified in Prior Lake Database (PLD) as well as unassigned features that have not been identified in the PLD nor PRD.

Datasets included in this release are listed below with their digital object identifiers linked to the PO.DAAC Web Portal. A user guide that is linked on the Documentation tab of each dataset landing page, as Product Description Documents.

SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_PIXC_V1:
https://doi.org/10.5067/KARIN-2PIX1

SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_PIXCVEC_V1:
https://doi.org/10.5067/KARIN-2PXV1

SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_RASTER_V1:
https://doi.org/10.5067/KARIN-2RAS1

SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_RIVERSP_V1:
https://doi.org/10.5067/KARIN-2RSP1

SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_LAKESP_V1:
https://doi.org/10.5067/KARIN-2LSP1

Download data using podaac-data-downloader (installation guide). Command line example:

% podaac-data-downloader -c SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_RASTER_V1 -d ./SWOT_SIMULATED_NA_CONTINENT_L2_HR_RASTER_V1 --start-date 2022-08-01T00:00:00Z --end-date 2022-08-22T00:00:00Z

Citation

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

SWOT. 2022.. SWOT Simulated Level 2 North America Continent KaRIn High Rate Water Mask Pixel Cloud Product Version 1.0. Ver. 1.0. PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Dataset accessed [YYYY-MM-DD] at https://doi.org/10.5067/<DOI Suffix>

Animation:

Simulated SWOT L2 River and Lake Vectors for Consecutive Passes over North America

Reference

Sylvain Biancamaria, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Tamlin M. Pavelsky. 2016. The SWOT Mission and Its Capabilities for Land Hydrology, Springer, 37, 2. 10.1007/s10712-015-9346-y, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32449-4_6

Altenau, E.H., Pavelsky, T.M., Durand, M.T., Yang, X., Frasson, R.P.D.M. and Bendezu, L., 2021. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission River Database (SWORD): A global river network for satellite data products. Water Resources Research, 57(7), p.e2021WR030054.

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