Sweet Water Overview, Thanks

The US government is preparing for a major SWOT analysis – but probably not the kind you’re familiar with. NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is set to launch a high-tech weather satellite into space later today, where it’ll perform the first-ever global survey of Earth’s surface water.

The $1.2 billion initiative, which aims to gather detailed information about oceans, lakes, and rivers and how they change over time, is a joint effort between NASA and France’s space agency.

But SWOT isn’t just about discovering the shape of water (🐟👱‍♂️). A major component of the mission is exploring how oceans absorb atmospheric heat and CO2. This natural process impacts global temperatures and sea levels. And soon we’ll have a whole lot more data on how.

• Once the SWOT satellite reaches orbit tomorrow afternoon, the SUV-sized spacecraft is expected to transmit ~1 terabyte of climate data back to Earth each day.

🌐 Looking ahead… NASA climate data-gathering missions are like the Mission Impossible franchise – there’s always another one on the horizon. The space agency is set to launch its $1.5 billion NISAR satellite next month, which features radar sensors able to detect movements of the Earth’s land, ice sheets, and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches. That craft is expected to transmit 80 terabytes of data per day.