{"id":236826,"date":"2026-01-16T19:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T19:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/236826\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T19:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T19:55:09","slug":"nasa-and-cnes-release-unprecedented-global-river-discharge-and-water-quality-estimates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/236826\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA and CNES Release Unprecedented Global River Discharge and Water Quality Estimates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since December 2022, the\u00a0Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT<\/a>) platform has provided valuable data and information about the world’s oceans and its terrestrial surface water. On land, SWOT captures\u00a0observations of water storage changes<\/a> (such as surface water area and water depth) of major lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and wetlands, and supports derived estimates of river discharge, which aid in assessing water resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n

SWOT estimates discharge by using the cloud-based, open-source Confluence computational framework, which was developed by members of the SWOT Discharge Algorithm Working Group and supported by\u00a0a grant from\u00a0NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO<\/a>). It merges outputs from six science algorithms developed over decades with in-situ measurements and observations from both\u00a0SWOT and\u00a0Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS<\/a>) to estimate river discharge and suspended sediment at the same time and at a global scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A result of collaboration between NASA and CNES (the French national space agency) science teams, the\u00a0SWOT Level 4 Sword of Science River Discharge Products, Version 3<\/a> are archived and made available through NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC<\/a>). These data are also available in\u00a0NASA Earthdata Search<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The SWOT Level 4 Sword of Science River Discharge Products, Version 3, provide\u00a0discharge time series for the six flow law parameter estimate (FLPE) algorithms and a single \u2018consensus\u2019 estimate that represents the canonical \u2018SWOT Discharge.\u2019<\/p>\n

The discharge product is organized by continent following\u00a0SWOT River Database (SWORD<\/a>) structure and naming conventions. It is indexed on the same reach and node identifier dimensions found in SWORD. 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\u00a0Confluence Module Documentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0River Discharge from the SWOT Mission video<\/a> provides an overview to help users better understand the discharge product. Please note that the discharge products associated with this release, referred to in the video as L4 Product Science Team Discharge data products, now meet mission requirements. To learn more about the contents and structure of the data product, refer to the\u00a0SWOT HR River Discharge Products v1.0 Quick Guide<\/a> and the\u00a0Graphical Overview<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For a practical introduction to the data product and access, explore this collection of\u00a0SWOT Discharge videos<\/a>. Additional data tutorials and resources are forthcoming. Users can refer to the PO.DAAC Cookbook –\u00a0SWOT Chapter<\/a> for the latest content.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Related press releases include NASA Science\u2019s\u00a0NASA-French SWOT Satellite Provides Global Estimate of River Discharge<\/a> and University of\u00a0Massachusetts Amherst\u2019s\u00a0Unprecedented Data on Global River Quality, Quantity Now Gathered From Space, Powered by UMass Amherst-Built Software<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

About Confluence<\/p>\n

The Confluence framework leverages the cloud, with the algorithms being co-located with SWOT data in the PO.DAAC archive hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. It also uses the PO.DAAC SWOT time series data service, the\u00a0Hydrocron API<\/a>. Both are making processing of the data more efficient than traditional data workflows, especially when working with large observational datasets such as those from the SWOT mission. More information is available in the SWOT-Confluence Github repository\u00a0Documentation section<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since December 2022, the\u00a0Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) platform has provided valuable data and information about the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[139889,139890,70024,53780,111,139,69,139888,147,123258],"class_list":["post-236826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-discharge-flow","tag-fresh-water-river-discharge","tag-hls","tag-karin","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-po-daac","tag-science","tag-swot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}