The new spacecraft’s data will have some synergy with many other Earth-observing satellites already in orbit. The satellite will also aid scientists who model storm surges-that is, when ocean water flows onto land. Hamlington sees SWOT as a boon for mapping rising sea waters and for researchers studying ocean currents and eddies, which affect how much atmospheric heat and carbon oceans absorb. “The trajectory we’re on is pointing us to the higher end of model projections,” he says, a point he made in a study last month in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The rate of sea-level rise is in fact accelerating, especially on the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the United States. “Within our satellite record, we’ve seen sea-level rise along US coastlines going up fast over the past three decades,” says Ben Hamlington, a sea-level rise scientist at JPL on the SWOT science team. New satellite data is important because the future of sea-level rise, floods, and droughts may be worse than some experts previously forecast. SWOT will orbit over each part of the planet and repeat its imaging there every 21 days during its three-year mission, seeing how the spread of water is changing over time. With each such measurement, KaRIn images an area about 30 miles on a side with rectangular pixels about 16 by 80 feet. The slight difference between the signals allows it to triangulate to determine the height of water. Also known as KaRIn, the instrument sends a radar pulse of 1.5 kilowatts down to the ground and a few milliseconds later detects the reflected signal using two antennas at each end of a 33-foot boom. The SUV-sized solar-powered spacecraft will collect much of this crucial data through its workhorse instrument, the Ka-band Radar Interferometer. This data will come in handy for a range of applications, like mapping the need for water and its availability for crop irrigation in rural areas measuring the extent of flooding, such as the recent deluge in Pakistan and assessing the climate vulnerability of places like the Congo river basin, which is frequently exposed to flash floods and droughts. That means it will survey millions of lakes and track some 1.3 million miles of rivers, many of them lacking on-the-ground data because they are not easily accessible by land. SWOT will be able to see lakes larger than 15 acres (or about 820 feet by 820 feet) and rivers wider than 330 feet across, Pavelsky said. Adding that new dimension is critical because it allows us to think about things in terms of changes in volume over time,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, a University of North Carolina researcher and the SWOT team’s hydrology science lead, at a press conference earlier this week. “The key advance for SWOT is that we’ll be able to simultaneously measure the extent and height of water. The joint mission, shared with the French, Canadian, and United Kingdom’s space agencies, will survey about 90 percent of the water on Earth-almost everything except the poles-using cloud-penetrating radar in order to create high-resolution maps of oceans, rivers, reservoirs, and lakes. Now they’ll have help from a dedicated satellite scanning the world’s water.Įarly Friday morning, NASA and its international partners plan to launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. To learn more about the Red Line Extension project and the CTA’s commitment to improve mobility, accessibility and economic opportunity throughout Chicago, watch the project video below ( click here to view with Spanish captions).Billions of people now live in rapidly changing coastal areas that must develop plans to adapt to a future that includes rising seas, crumbing cliffs, and devastating hurricanes. RLE is estimated to catalyze, or set the table, for $1.7 billion in real estate development in the half-mile station area between 2029-2040. Connecting People and Investing in Neighborhoods: RLE will be one of the single biggest investments on the Far South Side in decades and is a critical investment for CTA to expand its rapid transit network.New Opportunities for Chicagoans: RLE will pay dividends locally during construction and, once implemented, RLE is estimated to generate more than 25,000 jobs throughout Cook County in the coming years. A Better System for Everyone: RLE will help Far South Side residents reliably access jobs and opportunities outside their neighborhoods, which includes jobs within communities along the RLE project footprint and throughout the region.Improving the Transit Experience: RLE will provide up to 30-minute time savings to riders traveling from the future 130th Street station to the Loop and facilitate access to multiple CTA rail lines and bus routes.
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