PO.DAAC SWOT Hydrology Data Tools and Services

The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/) is NASA’s data center for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission (https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/SWOT?sections=data), which has recently launched in December 2022. PO.DAAC also archives physical oceanography data, which includes winds, salinity, sea surface temperature, gravity, ocean circulation, and a growing number of terrestrial hydrology data. The SWOT mission provides a comprehensive view of Earth's freshwater bodies from space and allows scientists to determine changing volumes of fresh water across the globe. SWOT hydrology data (of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs) is expected to be made publicly available in the latter part of 2023 (exact timeframe TBD). PO.DAAC has been preparing its data archive to deliver various tools and services to the hydrologic community in support of streamlined data access and use. In anticipation for SWOT, PO.DAAC has gathered requirements from the hydrology community over the last several years. In this presentation we will cover the various information systems developed to meet the hydrology community needs. PO.DAAC has also been working on migrating all of its data to the cloud. Users now have the ability to explore SWOT hydrology data directly in the Earthdata Cloud and also interface with the data using Application Programming interfaces (API). Hydrology domain specific data search and discovery methods (such as search by pre-defined hydrologic units) have also been implemented. PO.DAAC has been focused on exposing its SWOT hydrology data through programming interfaces such that scripting tools to GIS software can easily interface with the SWOT data. PO.DAAC has also been developing new functionalities to support analysis of large data, and new, innovative science and applications. Those functionalities and services will be discussed, along with what datasets users can find on the cloud, which will remain free and open to discover and access.