ToolBoxSWOT - A Python library dedicated to synthetical SWOT-like data for pre-launch river hydrodynamics studies.

The upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission will provide a global and high resolution measurement of river water surface elevation. This product issued from large swath interferometry altimetry will be combined with high fidelity hydrodynamics solvers thanks to data assimilation algorithms to allow for river discharge estimation and prediction. Before launch, the SWOT-HR hydrology simulator is used to produce synthetic SWOT observation at each overpass time, adding the radar measurement error, such as layover and thermal noise, to the water elevation issued from a golden run simulation. 

The ToolBoxSWOT is a chain of python scripts that formats the time varying hydrodynamic model outputs into a temporal sequence of water elevation raster data files used as inputs for SWOT-HR. A Digital Elevation Model, a geolocalized series of bathymetric profiles and river centerline are used to map the outputs of the hydrodynamic models onto the expected regular and high resolution 2D grid requested by SWOT-HR. The toolbox gathers strategies adapted to various levels of knowledge from well-known to unknown catchments. The ToolBoxSWOT is available on git and is provided with a container featuring the proper environment that embeds Python3, QGIS3, QGDAL and GRASS78. The ToolBoxSWOT was applied over a well-known reach of the Garonne river for which a DEM and gauge data are available as well as on the Brahmaputra river, using SWOT only-derived data. The toolbox allows the generation of various observation data sets available for the SWOT-hydrology community.