The SWOT Level 2 KaRIn High Rate Raster Product provides rasterized estimates of water surface elevation, inundation extent, and radar backscatter from the SWOT satellite's Ka-band Radar Interferometer. It aggregates irregular pixel cloud data onto a uniform geographic grid, with standard granules covering 128 × 128 km² scenes at 100 m and 250 m resolution. The product is provided by POCLOUD via NASA's Earthdata platform.
Use Cases
- Mapping water surface elevation changes based on corrected elevation layers.
- Analyzing inundation extent and dynamics based on water fraction and surface area layers.
- Studying radar backscatter characteristics of water bodies based on sigma0 data.
- Conducting spatiotemporal analysis of hydrologic features using the gridded, map-like format.
Strengths
- Data is derived from high-resolution radar observations by the SWOT satellite's KaRIn instrument.
- Standard granules provide consistent, non-overlapping 128 × 128 km² scenes.
- Product includes multiple 2D image layers for elevation, area, water fraction, and backscatter, along with quality flags and uncertainty estimates.
- On-demand versions allow for user-specified resolutions, projections, and GeoTIFF output.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
Provenance
- Source
- POCLOUD, derived from NASA's SWOT satellite mission.
- Collection Method
- Satellite remote sensing via the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn), with data processed into raster grids.
- Time Range
- null
- Freshness
- null
- Geography
- Global coverage of inland, estuarine, and coastal water domains.