SWOT mission design for advancing mesoscale oceanography

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission is being developed jointly by NASA and CNES with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency. The mission’s primary objectives are to map the elevations of land surface water and ocean topography with an instrument resolution of a few tens of meters for applications to land hydrology and mesoscale oceanography. A Science Definition Team was formed in late 2012 to work with the mission development team on the formulation of the mission’s science requirements. A number of aspects on the mission design that are key to the success of the oceanographic objectives of the mission will be addressed in the presentation. These include the expected resolution of signals, the measurement error budget, and the calibration of the measurement performance against past record of ocean topography.