![]() ![]() With each such measurement, KaRIn images an area about 30 miles on a side with rectangular pixels about 16 by 80 feet. ![]() The slight difference between the signals allows it to triangulate to determine the height of water. Also known as KaRIn, the instrument sends a radar pulse of 1.5 kilowatts down to the ground and a few milliseconds later detects the reflected signal using two antennas at each end of a 33-foot boom. The SUV-sized solar-powered spacecraft will collect much of this crucial data through its workhorse instrument, the Ka-band Radar Interferometer. This data will come in handy for a range of applications, like mapping the need for water and its availability for crop irrigation in rural areas measuring the extent of flooding, such as the recent deluge in Pakistan and assessing the climate vulnerability of places like the Congo river basin, which is frequently exposed to flash floods and droughts. That means it will survey millions of lakes and track some 1.3 million miles of rivers, many of them lacking on-the-ground data because they are not easily accessible by land. SWOT will be able to see lakes larger than 15 acres (or about 820 feet by 820 feet) and rivers wider than 330 feet across, Pavelsky said. Adding that new dimension is critical because it allows us to think about things in terms of changes in volume over time,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, a University of North Carolina researcher and the SWOT team’s hydrology science lead, at a press conference earlier this week. “The key advance for SWOT is that we’ll be able to simultaneously measure the extent and height of water. The joint mission, shared with the French, Canadian, and United Kingdom’s space agencies, will survey about 90 percent of the water on Earth-almost everything except the poles-using cloud-penetrating radar in order to create high-resolution maps of oceans, rivers, reservoirs, and lakes. Now they’ll have help from a dedicated satellite scanning the world’s water.Įarly Friday morning, NASA and its international partners plan to launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Billions of people now live in rapidly changing coastal areas that must develop plans to adapt to a future that includes rising seas, crumbing cliffs, and devastating hurricanes. ![]()
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