NASA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
Skip Navigation
Follow JPL
menu
close modal
Resources
Surface Water and Ocean Topography Fact Sheet
Published:
December 2, 2022
Related
From the headwaters to the coast ... SWOT has it covered.
Where's Water? Amazon
Where There's Water...There's SWOT provides an overview of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, which will make the first global survey of Earth's surface water.
Where There's Water...There's SWOT
From northern lakes to Arctic seas ... SWOT has it covered.
Where's Water? Arctic
From New York to Florida ... SWOT has it covered.
Where's Water? U.S. East Coast
From coasts to regions where debris flows ... SWOT has it covered.
Where's Water? Great Pacific "Garbage Patch"
From El Niño to sea level rise ... SWOT has it covered.
Where's Water? Tropical Pacific
Let's begin to explain how NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite observatory will work by looking at a water surface being pelted by rain.
How SWOT Will Work
SWOT will provide the very first comprehensive view of Earth's freshwater bodies from space.
Where There's Water on Land...There's SWOT
From Lake Powell to Southern California ... SWOT has it covered.
Where's Water? Colorado River
This is a visualization of changes in volume of the rivers of the world over the course of a year (October 2023 through September 2024).
SWOT River Volume Variations (rivers only)
Studies of the hydrosphere encompass observation, understanding, and prediction of the distribution and movement of water in the Earth System.
The Earth System Science Spheres - Hydrosphere
A recent NASA-led analysis using data from the SWOT satellite found that ocean features as small as a mile across potentially have a larger impact on the movement of nutrients and heat in marine ec...
Exploring High-Resolution Sea Surface Height Data from NASA's SWOT Satellite
Using 1 year of SWOT ocean data, we derive a global gravity field approaching a spatial resolution of 8 km, revealing more details than 30 years of satellite nadir altimetry.
SWOT Vertical Gravity Gradient
Hydrology Data Products from the SWOT Mission: Dr. Tamlin Pavelsky, NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Hydrology Science Lead, gives an overview of SWOT hydrology data products.
Hydrology Data Products from the SWOT Mission
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...
SWOT cryosphere animation: sea ice freeboard
The visualization shows that higher phytoplankton concentrations on Aug. 8, 2024 tended to coincide with areas of lower water height.
PACE and SWOT Visualization
For the first time, we can observe sea surface heights with complete global coverage (78S-78N) and exceptionally high resolution, extending all the way to coastal regions.
Global sea surface height by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission – the first 21-day cycle
This video gallery produced by CNES highlights some of the first images from the SWOT mission, from sea ice extent to coastal sea height to river and lake measurements around the globe.
CNES - First SWOT Images Video Gallery
An overview of SWOT's first data with mission engineer Curtis Chen
First SWOT data with engineer, Curtis Chen
Watch with NASA as we launch an international mission to understand the Earth's water like never before.
Launch of the International SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) Mission (NASA Broadcast)
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite deployed its solar arrays while in Earth orbit.
SWOT Deploys Solar Arrays
Highlights from the Dec. 15, 2022, launch of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, a mission led by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES). SW...
International SWOT Mission Launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base (Launch Recap)
This collaborative mission poster, designed by CNES (French Space Agency), shows the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite soaring over an abstract of a water molecule.
Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission Poster
Earth’s 370 quintillion gallons of water can be found all over the planet in lakes, rivers, glaciers, oceans, and groundwater. However, only a tiny fraction of this water is usable by humans. Under...
Earth's Water Budget
