Hydrocron is an application programming interface (API) that enables users to receive all Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) observations for a specific river ID within a specified date range. Hydrocron is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) using API Gateway, Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, and SNS notifications. As data are ingested into the archive, SWOT shapefiles are unpacked and each river reach (a 10-km section of a river) and node (a point every 200 meters along a reach) is added to a database.

Users can query the API with a feature ID (i.e., the specific ID of the reach or the node that a user is interested in), a time range of interest (both a start and an end date), and their desired data format (GeoJSON or CSV).