Documents
SWOT for the Amazom Basin SAMBA
Principal Investigator: Fabrice Papa (LEGOS- IRD Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement)
Co-Investigator(s): Daniel Moreira, Ayan Fleischmann, Frederic Frappart, Jean-Francois Cretaux, Adrien Paris, Mauricio Cordeiro, Santiago Pena Luque, Fernando Jaramillo, Alice Fassoni, Rodrigo Paiva, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Sly Wongchuig, Michel Calzas, Jefferson Melo, Rodrigo Abarca del Rio, Marie-Paule Bonnet, George Allen
The new project SAMBA (SWOT for the AMazon BAsin) builds upon the precursor project “SWOT for SOUTH AMERICA”, which was part of the 2020-2023 SWOT Science Team (SWOT-ST). Covering several thematic areas dealing with the water cycle, hydrology and hydroclimatology of South America, the objectives of SWOT for SOUTH AMERICA aimed at advancing water sciences in the context of SWOT and at connecting the community working on “hydrology from space” across South America. Combining and analyzing a wide variety of observations from remote sensing techniques, in-situ measurements and modeling, SWOT for SOUTH AMERICA generated numerous scientific outputs and key results related to SWOT.
Our new proposal, SAMBA, aims to build upon these past efforts and achievements, now with SWOT observations, at the scale of the Amazon basin. Our scientific objectives are twofold: 1) make use of SWOT measurements to improve the benefits of SWOT products for hydrology; 2) work towards answering cutting edge research questions with SWOT observations.
As the largest watershed on Earth, the Amazon plays a key role at a range of scales on the water, energy and carbon cycles, while also supporting an incredible biodiversity and many human communities across the basin. It contributes to about 20% of the total freshwater input from the continents to the global oceans annually. Now affected by multiple cumulative stressors, including changes in regional and global climate superimposed on human disturbances, observing and understanding the Amazon hydrology and its changes is of primary importance.
New SWOT data offer an unprecedented opportunity to study the Amazon River Basin's hydrology and water cycle. SAMBA proposes to explore SWOT measurements, along with a variety of other satellites, in situ and numerical modeling contributions to progress our understanding of the hydrology and water cycle of the region. We will work at different spatio-temporal scales, from basin scale to regional/local scales at several regions of interest (Mamiraua floodplains, Rio Negro, Curuai-Obidos-Tapajos, with some extension to French Guyana) to address key unanswered scientific questions, including: What is the seasonal amount of water filling and emptying the Amazon floodplains, its interannual variability and its behaviour during exceptional drought/flooding events? Which processes govern the water variability and extremes in the main rivers, tributaries and floodplains? What is the “true” Amazon River discharge, and how accurate is the data from SWOT across the basin? How much are floodplains and lake variability impacting the river dynamic and discharge? Can the Amazon floodplain topography be mapped with SWOT? How can SWOT help recognize and quantify the amount of water below vegetation hidden from optical sensors? How the assimilation of SWOT data can improve MGB hydrologic-hydrodynamic model simulations at different spatio-temporal scales? Can our results be extrapolated to other South American regions (Pantanal, Paraguay River, Meta, Orinoco)?
These questions can be now answered with new approaches and unprecedented detail with the availability of data from SWOT and their high spatial resolution and temporal sampling observations of the continental surface waters. These will be our efforts for the next four years.
In SAMBA, we preserve the same successful organizational and management plan of having work packages led by pairs of permanent leaders, one from France/Europe, one from Brazil/South America, and the cross-cutting interactions of all participants in various WPs and integrated tasks that bore success in the last project cycle. We will thus maintain our “South America “ group dynamic in the new SWOT Science Team 2024-2027, including as many scientists as possible from multiple countries. As the Amazon will be at the front of the international political and climate agenda for the coming years, our SAMBA project will also ensure international visibility to the SWOT mission.