Day 2: Remote Sensing -- Tuesday 16 July 2024 14:00-18:00 UTC
Introductory talk: Hydrology from Space: An Introduction to Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) Satellite
Merritt Harlan (United States Geological Survey)
This talk will introduce the exciting new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite (launched December 2022).
SWOT will provide novel global observations of water levels, extent and inundation in large rivers and lakes using a
wide-swath Ka-band radar interferometer. Some inland hydrology applications using SWOT include managing freshwater
resources in transboundary basins, monitoring reservoirs at scale, improving flood and hydrologic modeling, and progressing
our understanding of the water cycle. Here we introduce the SWOT satellite technology, demonstrate different types of data to expect,
highlight various visualization tools, and provide some examples of applications of SWOT data.
14:00-14:45 UTC - Keynote: Tracking the world's rivers with the SWOT satellite
Craig Brinkerhoff (Yale University)
The NASA/CNES SWOT satellite (launched in December 2022 and with data now publicly available) is expected to usher in a new age in global hydrology,
providing novel measurements of inland waters at an unprecedented resolution. This talk will briefly introduce two examples of using SWOT to track
global river transport processes and contextualize river fluxes within broader water and nutrient cycling. First, I introduce the community-level effort
to remotely sense river discharge in ungauged basins and global rivers as never before possible, and then I introduce an example of extending that work to
another domain: using SWOT to inform river greenhouse gas exchange and carbon emissions modeling.
A live stream of the pre-recorded keynote will begin at 14:00 UTC, followed immediately by a live Question and Answer session with the speakers.
14:45-15:00 UTC - Break
15:00-17:00 UTC - Workshop: SWOT Data Access Workshop
Interested in remote sensing of Earth’s water? Come join us for a workshop on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT)
satellite, a joint NASA-CNES venture! SWOT provides unprecedented measurements of surface water for hydrologic and oceanographic
science and applications. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to SWOT and the various ways to access and utilize
its data products, via Jupyter Notebooks and data transformation tools. Participants will be able to utilize a Binder environment
accessed via personal laptops to explore SWOT data using tutorials by PO.DAAC, NASA’s Physical Oceanography Data Active Archive Center.
All tutorials use the Python coding language, but no prior Python experience is necessary.
A traditional part of AEMON-J meetings in the past has been to openly discuss ideas for new, joint projects.
This time in the schedule is to bring up such ideas, perhaps inspired by the workshops earlier that day, and discuss.
If no such ideas are pitched, this time can also be used for small talk, networking, and other social activities.
