Water still our scarce scarce commodity- just try living one day in a hot country without it!
New 2 dimensional Sat Water mapping now available ex Space ...
Taking inventory of the Earth’s water resources repeatedly over Swot’s three-year mission will enable researchers to better trace fluctuations in the planet’s rivers and lakes during seasonal changes and major weather events.Nasa’s Swot freshwater science lead, Tamlin Pavelsky, said that collecting such data was akin to “taking the pulse of the world’s water system, so we’ll be able to see when it’s racing and we’ll be able to see when it’s slow”.Swot’s radar instrument operates at the so-called Ka-band frequency of the microwave spectrum, allowing scans to penetrate cloud cover and darkness over wide swaths of the Earth. This enables scientists to accurately map their observations in two dimensions regardless of weather or time of day and to cover large geographic areas far more quickly than was previously possible.
By comparison, earlier studies of water bodies relied on data taken at specific points, such as river or ocean gauges, or from satellites that can only track measurements along a one-dimensional line, requiring scientists to fill in data gaps through extrapolation.“Rather than giving us a line of elevations, it’s giving us a map of elevations, and that’s just a total gamechanger,” Pavelsky said.
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