Quantifying the net impact of the SWOT mission in improving our understanding of human regulation of surface water around the world

Principle Investigator: Faisal Hossain (University of Washington)

Collaborator(s): Pritam Das, Arifuzzaman Bhuyan, Hisham Eldardiry, Susantha Jayasinghe, Charles Seaton

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This project will embark on multi-decadal and global analyses of the state of our planet's surface water with digital twin experiments to understand the net improvement in our quantification of human impact of surface water availability that is afforded by SWOT. The central research question this project will answer is as follows: 'What is the net gain of SWOT in improving our understanding of the human impact of surface water availability around the world?' The key project objectives are:

1. Demonstrate the impact of SWOT's KaRIN data (on area, elevation and storage change of reservoirs) in improving predictability of human-impacted surface water storage change.
2. Quantify the improvement afforded by SWOT in our understanding of historical and multi-decadal trends in surface water regulation with SWOT at global and regional scales using a global implementation of Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT version 3.0).
3. Promote SWOT improvements in regulated surface water storage tracking to five selected stakeholder agencies through co-developed RAT-based decision-support tools that are currently in operation.

The PI will engage with five water agencies located in the Pacific Northwest (Columbia River Inter-tribal Fish Commission), Mesopotamia (Ministry of Water Resources- Iraq), Nile (Alexandria University- Egypt), Ganges Delta (Bangladesh Water Development Board - Bangladesh) and Western Ghats (Kerala Centre of Water Resources Management and Development - India). The key modeling platform that will be used for digital twin experiments is the computationally robust, globally scalable, open-source and multi-satellite Reservoir Assessment Tool (RAT) that was recently upgraded to version 3.0 to be SWOT data compatible. RAT will be set up at 20,000 of the world's major and large reservoirs.

The proposed project will address the 2.2 of the solicitation - 'Novel Earth Science and Research Applications with SWOT.' By embarking on a global study addressing all the world's large reservoirs, the project will explore the human footprint of the surface water budget of the Earth's water cycle as a complete system. Next, the project will articulate SWOT's unique contribution in the form of 'net gain' and 'improvement in understanding' in predicting human regulation of surface water at global and regional scales. This will be achieved with synergistic use of SWOT with non-SWOT satellites (Landsat, Sentinel and Jason series) and very well-developed modeling platform called RAT 3.0. Finally, the utility of integrating SWOT L2 data on reservoirs for societal success stories of water management will be demonstrated for five water management agencies

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