SWOT Level 4 Sword of Science River Discharge Products, Version 3 Released

NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) released the SWOT Level 4 Sword of Science River Discharge Products, Version 3.

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is implemented jointly by NASA and Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) to provide valuable data and information about the world's oceans and its terrestrial surface water such as lakes, rivers, and wetlands. This data collection provides discharge time series for the six flow law parameter estimate (FLPE) algorithms and a single ‘consensus’ estimate that represents the canonical ‘SWOT Discharge.’

The discharge product is organized by continent (excluding Antarctica) following SWOT River Database (SWORD) structure and naming conventions. Sword of Science data products are generated from the open-source SWOT Confluence program and contain river discharge parameter estimates as well as discharge time series for both river reaches and river nodes, following the SWORD structure. Time series data is stored by cycle and pass on an observation dimension. Outputs from Confluence are organized into groups corresponding to modules in the SWOT-Confluence processing software. Modules are described in the Confluence Module Documentation.

These L4 discharge and water quality time series are available as netCDF, and released with an estimate of discharge matching each quality-controlled SWOT observation. The temporal frequency of discharge estimates is different for each river.

The dataset can be accessed through NASA Earthdata Search and via the DOI (https://doi.org/10.5067/SWOT-SOS-RD3), which redirects to the corresponding dataset landing page. 

If you have questions, please contact PO.DAAC user services or visit PO.DAAC on Earthdata Forum.