Map image of where water sits on land (SWOT) — SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_D

In plain English

What it measures. Produces map images of water on land, showing the height of water surfaces, how far water extends, and radar brightness across rivers, lakes, wetlands, and coasts.

How it's made. Made by the KaRIn radar interferometer on the SWOT satellite, which reshapes scattered radar measurements onto an even grid at 100 m and 250 m detail.

How & where you'd use it. Supports flood mapping and studies of complex water environments like braided rivers, floodplains, and estuaries that are hard to track other ways.

What's measured

TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER FEATURES › RIVERS/STREAMSTERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER PROCESSES/MEASUREMENTSTERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER FEATURES › LAKES/RESERVOIRS

Coverage & cadence

Time span2022-12-16 → ongoing
Measured bySWOT (KaRIn, Jason-class Altimeter, AMR, DORIS, GPSP, LRA)
Processing levelLevel 2
Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
FormatsnetCDF-4
StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage

Official description

The SWOT Level 2 KaRIn High Rate Raster Product (SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_D) provides rasterized estimates of water surface elevation, inundation extent, and radar backscatter derived from high-resolution radar observations by the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) on the SWOT satellite. This product aggregates the irregularly spaced pixel cloud data from the PIXC and PIXCVec products onto a uniform geographic grid to facilitate spatial analysis of water surface features across inland, estuarine, and coastal domains. Standard granules cover non-overlapping 128 × 128 km² scenes in the UTM projection at 100 m and 250 m resolution, stored in NetCDF-4 format. Each file contains 2D image layers representing water surface elevation (corrected for geoid, solid Earth, load, and pole tides, as well as atmospheric and ionospheric path delays), surface area, water fraction, and sigma0, along with quality flags and uncertainty estimates. On-demand versions are available at user-specified resolutions and projections, with optional overlapping granules and GeoTIFF output via SWODLR: https://swodlr.podaac.earthdatacloud.nasa.gov/ The raster product offers a gridded alternative to the unstructured pixel cloud, supporting hydrologic and geomorphic analyses in complex flow environments such as braided rivers, floodplains, wetlands, and coastal zones. It enables consistent spatiotemporal sampling while reducing noise through spatial aggregation, making it especially suitable for applications that require map-like continuity or integration with geospatial models. This dataset is the parent collection to the following sub-collections: https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_100m_D https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_250m_D

Get the data

swot_l2_hr_raster_d_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_D",
    version="D",
    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 POCLOUD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links