Li-Lueng Fu, a scientist on NASA’s first global survey of Earth’s surface waters, was shocked to see how well the mission went. A few days after the joint NASA-French space agency turned on the main instrument on the CNES Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, engineers sent Fu an image of sea surface elevation that seemed too good to be true.

“I said, ‘You’re trying to play a cruel joke on me,’ because it’s usually not possible to make these things clear,” Fu said Dec. 12 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

It often takes months to fine-tune algorithms to improve data quality. Ocean observations for SWOT’s Ka-band radar interferometer became clear immediately.

“When you see that clarity, you immediately know that something is actually working right,” said Fu, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee and senior scientist.

At the AGU meeting, NASA researchers also praised the work of other Earth observation sensors. Tropospheric Emissions: Pollution monitoring “works incredibly well,” said Barry Lefer, NASA’s tropospheric composition program manager. EMIT principal investigator Robert Green said the Mineral Dust Source Probe Spectrometer on the International Space Station was a “refined instrument” that “exceeded all our expectations”.

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Even in this environment, SWOT’s praise stood out.

“Achieving this mission was impossible even in my wildest dreams,” Fu said, adding that SWOT was the fourth NASA mission.

For oceanography in particular, SWOT “works outside the box,” said Tamlin Pavelski, SWOT’s scientific director of hydrology. As for hydrology, “We see the promise of how great it will be. However, we need to write new software to process this data better.”

SWOT’s improved performance will allow researchers to monitor water levels in lakes and rivers that are smaller than they expected.

Lakes were expected to appear in SWOT before its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December 2022. < a i=3>6 hectares. Instead, SWOT can be used to monitor approximately 6 million lakes up to one hectare in size.

“I’m confident we’ll see almost all of these lakes, at least for a while,” said Pavelski, a professor of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina. Source