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CrustalTrudger t1_ivjlbf1 wrote

Thanks for joining us! It seems like one of the underlying goals is to understand freshwater fluxes. I'm curious how you'll convert river level heights to volumes / cross-sectional areas to asses changes through time, i.e., how will you get at the channel cross sectional geometry / wetted perimeter to pair with the surface heights to be able to calculate volumes? I'm also wondering if you're planning on validating these data with discharge measurements from relevant gages?

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nasa t1_ivl069o wrote

The current plan from the SWOT Science Team is to use river width together with the elevation of the water surface that will be directly measured by SWOT. We'll calculate the slope of the top of the river from measurements of elevation, and we'll infer changes in the cross-sectional area from joint changes in elevation and in width. However, this does leave a big unknown: the minimal (unseen) cross-sectional area.

We will make a best guess for that based on many months of data through fitting with a simple equation for hydraulics (Manning Equation). Everything we produce, including our estimates of river discharge, will come with an estimate of uncertainty.

And, of course, we'll be using ground measurements at selected locations around the Earth for validation. (CD)

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WesternOne9990 t1_ivmhyrf wrote

I’m really psyched about NASA and what y’all represent in humanity and like rockets are really cool. I don’t have anything to add something gave me a chuckle. I thought, theres an avenue for me to tell a NASA employee, a representative of the worlds top scientist that their water science team sounds like snot. So yeah anyways, continue on with your all’s day. Thanks for your all’s work :)

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