Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), by Paul Fawson, translated by Liu Jiayu

The SWOT satellite will collect carbon absorption data from the global water cycle and swirls at unprecedented resolution, and its microwave radar will fully scan the world every 21 days.

It will improve ocean circulation models, provide support for climate prediction and explore how the ocean absorbs atmospheric heat and carbon dioxide.

The whirlpool in the ocean of the SWOT satellite has been ignored.

These turbulent water swirls, ranging from thousands to hundreds of kilometers in diameter, peel off huge ocean currents and mix heat and carbon dioxide into deeper ocean layers, like cream into coffee.

Whirlpools are the most dynamic feature of the ocean and are essential for correct climate modeling, but past moons are difficult to capture unless they happen to sweep through large amounts of green phytoplankton.

After the launch of the surface water and ocean topography (SWOT) satellite jointly developed by NASA and CNES, the whirlpool and the ebb and flow of rivers and lakes on land will become the focus of attention.

The $1.2 billion satellite is scheduled to be launched on December 15 from Vandenberg Pacific Air Force Base in California aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The satellite carries a centimeter water surface altimeter with an error of centimeter and can observe eddies.

"SWOT will make a big difference." Said J Thomas Filer, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). Thomas Farrar.

"it's like giving oceanographers a pair of high-definition glasses." Said Rosemary Morrow, a physical oceanographer at the Space, Geophysics and Oceanography Research Laboratory in Toulouse, France.

The SWOT satellite can capture swirls as small as 7 kilometers in diameter and scan the entire planet in 21 days. SWOT will map the height changes of more than 6 million lakes and capture the flow of rivers with a width of more than 100 meters.

It will replace ground gauges with discrete discontinuous data, making hydrological data more complete and global than ever before. "this will help us understand the way the water cycle is carried out in places like the Arctic and Africa where there is no ground data." Said Tamlin Pavelsky, a hydrologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led the SWOT freshwater science team.

Observing eddies to help deal with global warming for nearly 40 years, NASA and CNES have launched a series of radar altimeter satellites to measure water level by reflecting pulses from radar.

These satellites monitor the accelerated rise in global sea levels, a basic indicator of climate change. By measuring the bulges and depressions of the oceans, they also capture large-scale ocean currents sweeping the world. But rivers and small swirls cannot be seen at the satellite's rough spatial resolution.

With the help of two 5-meter-long arms, SWOT gets a clearer view. Each arm is equipped with an antenna to capture the reflection of SWOT pulses to the earth's surface.

High-gain antennas allow SWOT to measure the height of waters as small as a few thousand meters wide, making it possible to observe small swirls.

With accurate observations, hydrologists can understand how lakes and rivers change seasonally, as well as the effects of short-term climate drivers such as El Ni ñ o.

For marine ecologists, SWOT will be able to map how the water levels of the world's major rivers fall when dams or embankments are closed, and the severity of damage to aquatic habitats. It can also monitor the evolution of rivers and even capture floods downstream, which will help with flood modeling.

Although SWOT is expected to operate for only three years, scientists plan to look for correlations between the data it observed and the characteristics of water bodies observed by Landsat in visible light, such as the changing widths of lakes and rivers.

These visible changes can be used as a basis for changes in water levels, allowing researchers to continue to pay close attention to the earth's water cycle. "even if SWOT no longer exists, scientists can continue to do research and analysis," Pavelski said. "

SWOT's observation of the vortex may be its greatest gain.

WHOI physical oceanographer Sylvia Cole (Sylvia Cole) said SWOT will observe how thousands of small eddies in the ocean stir the ocean. The swirl, which is only a few kilometers in diameter, may have brought heat and carbon to the oceans near the poles, or even promoted the mixing of smaller sea areas, Morrow said. "We may have underestimated the energy of more than 90% of water resources because we ignored these small-scale water cycles."

S ö nke Dangendorf, a physical oceanographer at Tulane University, believes that on the coastline, SWOT will provide detailed data on the impact of sea-level rise on coastal flood conditions.

The ocean absorbs more than 90% of the excess heat in the earth's atmosphere, most of which are greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

The research will help climate scientists answer a key question: "when is the turning point when the oceans begin to release large amounts of heat into the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming."

Reference link

Https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-mission-will-study-hidden-ocean-swirls-soak-heat-global-warming

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