GUEST ARTICLE
Building Pathways to Societal Applications of the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) Satellite Mission Faisal Hossain, Margaret Srinivasan, Alice Andral and Ed Beighley
SWOT IS A RESEARCH SATELLITE MISSION (Fig. 1), planned for launch in 2021, and developed jointly by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Centre for National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) of France, with participation from the Canadian and UK space agencies. The SWOT mission will serve both the hydrology and oceanography communities by providing the first global survey of Earth’s surface waters including rivers, reservoirs, lakes, and wetlands, as well as unprecedented detail in the topography of the ocean surface. Following a US workshop in May 2018 (see Beighley et al., Water Resources IMPACT , 21(2):30-31, March 2019) in May 20-21, 2019 a workshop was organized at CNES headquarters (HQ) in Paris for SWOT Early Adopters (EA). These EAs had earlier proposed a tangible plan to proactively assess the utility
understand the progress they have made, document the hurdles and needs they face and identify clear pathways to accelerate successful use of SWOT data after launch. The workshop was organized by the SWOT Application Working
Figure 2. Participants of the 2019 SWOT Early Adopter Workshop
Group (SAWG) leads with support provided by the NASA Applied Sciences Program, the SWOT Project, and CNES. This is the second such EA workshop designed to explore ways to maximize the user-readiness of SWOT data after launch. Summaries from previous SWOT applications workshops are available here: https://go.nasa.gov/2LmIHtc More than forty participants attended the workshop in person or remotely. Representatives from eleven EA agencies, spanning three continents, participated as potential users of SWOT data and presented updates on their project over the two days (Fig. 2). These participants represented various stakeholder agencies from the public and private sectors that deal with water issues including; Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Pakistan Council for Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), Collecte Localisation Satellites (CLS), BRL Ingénierie (BRLi), Consortium of Universities to Advance Hydrologic Science Institute (CUAHSI), NASA SPoRT, Compagnie Nationale du Rhône (CNR), Mercator, University of Bonn, Mercator-Océan and FM Global. SWOT Project representatives shared plans and expected timelines for provisioning simulated SWOT data for use by the Project, the Science Team, and by EAs. A hands-on
Figure 1. The SWOT satellite mission
of future SWOT data to address the needs of their respective agencies on surface water or ocean related applications. With two years to launch, it was considered an opportune time to engage with the EAs to provide further hands-on training,
September 2019
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