NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is delivering new perspectives on global waterways, offering detailed observations of how rivers move, change, and sustain life across Earth. The mission focuses on monitoring surface water dynamics with advanced radar technology to track water levels and flow patterns.
SWOT employs Ka-band radar interferometry to measure water surface elevations with centimeter-level precision across rivers wider than 100 meters and lakes larger than 62,500 square meters. The spacecraft operates from a sun-synchronous orbit, providing global coverage every 21 days to capture temporal changes in water systems.