Projects

SWOT for Ice-covered Rivers and Lakes (SWIRL)

Principal Investigator: Alexei Kouraev (University of Toulouse III, LEGOS)

Co-Investigator(s): Elena Zakharova

Collaborator(s): Nicholas Hall, Jean-François Crétaux

The main goal of the project is to study seasonally ice-covered rivers and lakes using SWOT data, ancillary multi-satellite and multi-frequency observations and data from field campaigns.

Specific goals of the project are:

To investigate the specifics of SWOT instruments measurements over several seasonally freezing rivers and lakes having different ice and snow characteristics and different river channel and river valley morphology
To analyse spatial variability of Ka-band signal (SLC data) over river and lake ice and compare it with other radar data, such as C-band Sentinel-1.
To understand why the performance of winter and especially flood rise water level retrievals are so different for different arctic rivers.
To improve the discharge estimation for arctic rivers using parameters such as water height, slope and river width.
To improve classification of ice and snow cover based on enhanced understanding of SWOT phenomenology
To study mesoscale water dynamics in lakes (eddies, fronts etc) from high-resolution 3D water level maps