SWOT Simulated River Vectors: North America

Simulated data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission provides a preview of river vector products for the North America continent. The dataset contains two geospatial shapefiles for river reaches (approximately 10 km long) and nodes (approximately 200 m spacing), with attributes likely including water surface elevation, slope, width, and uncertainty estimates. This is a simulated product derived from the Ka-band Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument and is not suited for scientific exploration.

Use Cases

• Testing data processing pipelines for SWOT river products based on the simulated reach and node structure.
• Visualizing the spatial layout of SWOT's KaRIn measurement swath (128 km wide with a 20-km nadir gap) over North American rivers.
• Understanding the relationship between river reaches and nodes as defined in the prior river database (PRD).

Strengths

• Provides a structured preview of the official SWOT mission's future river data product format.
• Contains detailed geospatial vector data with two distinct feature types (reaches and nodes) and specific spatial scales (10 km reaches, 200 m nodes).
• Dataset is hosted by the authoritative source, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Limitations

• Explicitly described as a simulated product and not suited for any scientific exploration.
• Metadata completeness is low, with column names, row counts, and specific license terms not provided.
• Conflicting 'last updated' dates exist between sources (2026-04-09 on datagov vs. 2022-08-22 on nasa_earthdata).

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Derived from simulated measurements of the SWOT mission's Ka-band Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument.

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:46:40.220088

Geography

North America continent