Siberian Lakes

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Open House visitors are delighted to see how well their color-coded stickers match the "sea surface topography model of the Gulf of Mexico within a wooden box.

Crowds flock to the Earth Sciences exhibits during the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) "Open House" event, giving volunteers (red shirts) a chance to share information about their various miss...

An artist’s concept of the SWOT spacecraft (March 2012).

Engineers integrate separate parts of the SWOT satellite into one in a Thales Alenia Space clean room facility in Cannes, France.

SWOT technologies - advanced wide-swath technology, ocean and surface water topography measurements, and high-resolution products - will support such societal needs as dams, shipping, and surface w...

Emblem for the SWOT mission.

AirSWOT is using parts of Saskatchewan as a testing ground for mapping water levels.

Artist’s concept of seven altimeters orbiting Earth: Jason-CS/Sentinel-6B, SWOT, Sentinel-6A, Jason 3, TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason 1 and OSTM/Jason 2.

A Flooded Forest in the Amazon

SWOT will collect data across a 75-mile (120-kilometer) wide swath, with a gap in the center for an altimetry track. This animation shows the collection of data over the state of Florida, which is ...

Lake Calado, Amazon

The Canadian Space Agency will contribute to the SWOT Mission by providing a high-power assembly component for SWOT’s Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn).

Artist's impression of the future SWOT satellite making sea surface height observations, even through clouds.

Teams from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, California, loaded the scientific payload for the SWOT Earth-observing satelli...

Amazon Fishermen

SWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and Centre National D’Études Spatiales (CNES).

This animation shows estimates of average sea ice freeboard — or the amount of ice above the waterline — taken over a 21-day period from Aug. 8, 2023, to Jan. 14, 2024, by the Surface Water and Oce...

The logo for the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission.

An artist’s concept of the SWOT spacecraft (January 2012).

Canada is home to more than 30,000 lakes including these water bodies in Northern Alberta. The abundance of surface freshwater in Canada makes it a prime target for AirSWOT investigations.

A diagram illustrating the swaths of data that SWOT will collect. 

An artist’s concept of the SWOT spacecraft (February 2015).

A photograph of the Amazon River Delta, captured by Landsat in 2006.

A photograph of the Varzea Forest area of Brazil (3 of 4).

An image of the original concept for the Water and Terrestrial Elevation Recovery (WATER) Mission, which later became SWOT.