SWOT_L2_HR_PIXCVec_D: Per-Feature Water Body Attributes from Satellite

NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite provides per-feature summaries of lakes and rivers from Ka-band radar interferometry. This auxiliary product structures raw pixel data into georeferenced features, each with averaged attributes like water surface height, area, width, and slope. It is designed to enable consistent tracking of water bodies over time for hydrological analysis.

Use Cases

• River discharge estimation based on derived water surface height, width, and slope.
• Time series analysis of water surface elevation for lakes based on per-feature height summaries.
• Linking satellite-observed water bodies to external hydrologic databases using provided identifiers.
• Consistent tracking of specific river reach or lake features over multiple satellite passes.

Strengths

• Data is structured at the hydrologic feature level (e.g., individual river reaches, lakes), enabling object-based analysis.
• Product follows Climate and Forecast (CF) metadata conventions, promoting interoperability.
• Each data granule corresponds to a high-resolution KaRIn tile covering approximately 64 km².

Limitations

• Specific column names and data volume (row count, file size) are not provided by any source.
• License is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without details on reuse terms.
• The 'last updated' metadata date of 2026-04-09 appears to be a future date, indicating a potential metadata error.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Derived from Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) measurements on the SWOT satellite.

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:46:49.128561 (Note: This is a future date, which may be an error.)

Geography

Global, collected in swaths corresponding to the SWOT satellite's orbit.