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Full catalog/DeltaX_L2_AirSWOT_WaterElev_V3_2350
DeltaX_L2_AirSWOT_WaterElev_V3_2350·v3·dataset

Water surface height in the Louisiana delta (airborne, 2021)

Delta-X: AirSWOT L2 Geocoded Water Surface Elevation, MRD, LA, 2021, V3
ocean NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 2 multiple
In plain English

What it measures. High-resolution maps of how high the water surface sits across the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana, capturing the elevation of channels, wetlands, and water bodies.

How it's made. An airborne radar called AirSWOT, flown on a King Air aircraft during 2021 field campaigns, used radar interferometry to map water-surface height, with this version corrected by a refined ground survey.

How & where you'd use it. Scientists use it to study water levels and slopes in the delta and to test and validate measurements from the SWOT satellite, which does the same job from space.

What's measured

OCEANS › COASTAL PROCESSES › COASTAL ELEVATIONTERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER PROCESSES/MEASUREMENTS › DRAINAGECLIMATE INDICATORS › ATMOSPHERIC/OCEAN INDICATORS › SEA LEVEL RISEBIOSPHERE › ECOSYSTEMS › MARINE ECOSYSTEMS › COASTALLAND SURFACE › TOPOGRAPHY › TERRAIN ELEVATION › DIGITAL ELEVATION/TERRAIN MODEL (DEM)TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER FEATURES › WATER CHANNELS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2021-03-26 → 2021-09-12
  • Measured byKing Air (AirSWOT)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-91.6, 28.98, -90.21, 29.86
  • Formatsmultiple
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

This dataset contains Level 2 (L2) AirSWOT geocoded products, including estimated water surface elevation. The AirSWOT instrument is a Ka-band interferometer and for this study is flown on the King Air B200 platform. Data were collected during the DeltaX airborne campaign over the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins of the Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana, USA. Flights occurred during the Delta-X Spring 2021 deployment from 2021-03-26 to 2021-04-18 and the Delta-X Fall 2021 deployment from 2021-08-21 to 2021-09-12. AirSWOT is capable of producing high resolution (3.6 m) digital elevation models over land and water bodies using near-nadir wide-swath Ka-band radar interferometry to measure water-surface elevation and produce continuous gridded elevation data. The instrument includes six antennas that form multiple baseline pairs for along-track and across-track interferometry. AirSWOT elevation data are useful for calibrating elevation and slopes along the main channels, as well as tying observations to open ocean tidal conditions and is an airborne calibration and validation instrument for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. This Version 3 dataset provides updated data files due to an updated Calumet survey that changed the water level by 0.138 m. This resulted in all the AirSWOT water levels changing by that same amount. For these L2 products, only the estimated water surface elevation in respect to the WGS84 ellipsoid surface, and estimated height above the NAVD88 (GEOID12B) vertical datum files changed. Note that data acquired on September 1 and September 5, 2021 do not meet the expected MAE in-situ comparison and should be used with caution. This dataset contains cloud optimized GeoTIFF rasters in UTM map coordinates for each flight line. In addition, a text file provides basic metadata, including flight line ID, start and end UTC times of data acquisition, processor version number, and the date and time of different processing stages.

Get the data

deltax_l2_airswot_waterelev_v3_2350_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="DeltaX_L2_AirSWOT_WaterElev_V3_2350",
    version="3",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.