SWOT may turn into a serious enchancment over measurements by earlier satellites. “As an alternative of a ‘pencil beam’ transferring alongside the Earth’s floor from a satellite tv for pc, it’s a large swath. It’ll present much more data, much more spatial decision, and hopefully higher protection up near the coasts,” says Steve Nerem, a College of Colorado scientist who makes use of satellite tv for pc knowledge to review sea-level rise and isn’t concerned with SWOT. And KaRIn’s swath-mapping expertise is a brand-new approach, he says. “It’s by no means been examined from orbit earlier than, so it’s type of an experiment. We’re wanting ahead to the information.”
SWOT has different devices in its toolkit too, together with a radar altimeter to fill within the gaps between the swaths of knowledge KaRIn collects, a microwave radiometer to measure the quantity of water vapor between SWOT and the Earth’s floor, and an array of mirrors for laser-tracking measurements from the bottom.
New satellite tv for pc knowledge is necessary as a result of the way forward for sea-level rise, floods, and droughts could also be worse than some consultants beforehand forecast. “Inside our satellite tv for pc document, we’ve seen sea-level rise alongside US coastlines going up quick over the previous three many years,” says Ben Hamlington, a sea-level rise scientist at JPL on the SWOT science group. The speed of sea-level rise is in truth accelerating, particularly on the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the USA. “The trajectory we’re on is pointing us to the upper finish of mannequin projections,” he says, some extent he made in a research final month within the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Hamlington sees SWOT as a boon for mapping rising sea waters and for researchers finding out ocean currents and eddies, which have an effect on how a lot atmospheric warmth and carbon oceans take up. The satellite tv for pc can even support scientists who mannequin storm surges—that’s, when ocean water flows onto land.
The brand new spacecraft’s knowledge can have some synergy with many different Earth-observing satellites already in orbit. These embody NASA’s Grace-FO, which probes underground water through gravity fluctuations, NASA’s IceSat-2, which surveys ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice, and business flood-mapping satellites that use artificial aperture radar to see by way of clouds. It additionally follows different altimeter-equipped satellites, just like the US-European Jason-3, the European House Company’s Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite tv for pc, China’s Haiyang satellites, and the Indian-French Saral spacecraft.
Knowledge from these satellites has already proven that a point of sea-level rise, excessive floods, storms, and droughts are already baked into our future. However we’re not doomed to local weather catastrophes, Hamlington argues, as a result of we are able to use this knowledge to fend off essentially the most excessive projected outcomes, like those who trigger fast glacier or ice sheet soften. “Lowering emissions takes a few of the larger projections of sea-level rise off the desk,” he says. “Since catastrophic ice sheet loss will solely happen below very heat futures, if we are able to restrict warming going ahead, we are able to keep away from worst-case situations.”
