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Welcome
Welcome to the SWOT satellite mission concept. Please feel free to contact us with your questions and comments.
The Surface Water Ocean Topography mission brings together two communities focused on a better understanding of the world's oceans and its terrestrial surface waters. Our understanding of the oceanic circulation at mesoscales and smaller, where most of the ocean's kinetic energy and its dissipation takes place, is poor. Likewise, the role of internal tides as sources of mixing as well as coastal processes such as upwelling, jets, and fronts are not well understood. Given our basic need for fresh water, the most important hydrologic observations that can be made in a basin are of the temporal and spatial variations in water volumes stored in rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Unfortunately, we have poor knowledge of the global dynamics of terrestrial surface waters as well as their interactions with coastal oceans in estuaries.
Thus, we propose the SWOT Satellite Mission and its wide-swath altimetry technology as a means of completely covering the world's oceans and freshwater bodies with repeated elevation measurements. SWOT is a truly cooperative and collegial joint international effort consisting of researchers worldwide. A hallmark of SWOT is our welcoming of everyone interested in solving ocean and water related problems.
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SWOT and WATER HM
In February 2008 we adopted the name SWOT, replacing the original name WATER HM. The name change keeps the consistency with the SWOT name created by the NRC Decadal Survey. This name change is necessary for tracing the mission to other government documents such as those indicating U.S. Congressional budgeting actions.
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