Work

Assessing the Accuracy of SWOT Measurements of Water Bodies in Australia

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission provides an unparalleled observation system for monitoring global surface water resources. We compared different SWOT level‐2 high‐rate products and in situ data for rivers, lakes and reservoirs in Australia, utilizing quality flags and uncertainty indicators present in these data products. Water heights derived from the Raster product have a weighted root‐mean‐square error of 5 cm but the product fails to sample small water bodies. The use of LakeSP and RiverSP spatial definitions of water bodies yields accuracies typically between 20 and 30 cm but often do not include data for Australian water bodies and/or small river sections. Our approach using pixel cloud data achieves an accuracy of 5 cm in measuring water heights over rivers as narrow as 40 m wide and reservoirs as small as m, well below the mission requirements of 100 m river width and m lake area.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

DOI: 10.1029/2024gl114084

Authors: Louise Maubant, Lachlan Dodd, Paul Tregoning

Institution: Australian National University

Language: English

Topic: Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies

Subfield: Water Science and Technology

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Clean water and sanitation

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,190