NASA's Mission for Earth's Ocean

NASA's Mission for Earth's Ocean

Written by Rebekah Hyuna Lee

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is NASA’s mission to tackle issues related to Earth’s changing ocean, availability of freshwater resources, and other matters. Their studies are an essential for the achievement of global goals on clean air and water, preparation for extreme events, and long-term environmental changes. 

In order to monitor water resources on land, track sea level changes, and monitor coastal processes and ocean currents, SWOT uses radar interferometry technology to observe various bodies of water.

As a result of global warming, there is a constant movement of freshwater resources from rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. A thorough knowledge of river flow is essential to manage water resources and forecast floods and droughts, and control its impacts on sectors such as industry and agriculture. To help scientists better understand the global water cycle, SWOT manages this by providing data from thousands of lakes and rivers.

Although much of the technology used today monitors ocean currents occurring large-scale, much of the motion in the ocean occurs small-scale, making them difficult to detect with our current satellites. These small-scale factors affect a great portion of the transport of water, making them important factors when it comes to assessing climate change, even though they occur at much smaller scales than El Niño and La Niña conditions. SWOT makes it possible to measure small-scale ocean currents, better understand coastal processes, and develop more advanced models of ocean circulation data. 

Source: https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/science/overview/?page=0&per_page=40&order=position+asc&search=&hover=false&show_institution=true&show_email=false&category=214