A New NASA Satellite Will Map Earth’s Rising Seas

upstart writes:

A New NASA Satellite Will Map Earth's Rising Seas:

[Ed. note: satellite successfully launched on December 17]

Early 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. 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.

"The key advance for SWOT is that we'll be able to simultaneously measure the extent and height of water. 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.

[...] SWOT could turn out to be a major improvement over measurements by previous satellites. "Instead of a 'pencil beam' moving along the Earth's surface from a satellite, it's a wide swath. It'll provide a lot more information, a lot more spatial resolution, and hopefully better coverage up close to the coasts," says Steve Nerem, a University of Colorado scientist who uses satellite data to study sea-level rise and is not involved with SWOT. And KaRIn's swath-mapping technology is a brand-new technique, he says. "It's never been tested from orbit before, so it's kind of an experiment. We're looking forward to the data."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.