The Early Adopter Program for the Surface Water Ocean Topography Satellite Mission: Lessons Learned in Building User Engagement during the Prelaunch Era

Reimagining the Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission as the “Landsat” of Surface Water [Perspective]

“…These EAs have been building technical literacy on the SWOT mission, learning SWOT's data structure, and exploring how exactly SWOT data can add value or solve a previously unsolved societal challenge. Finally, these EAs are also preparing to lay the software and hardware infrastructure necessary for ingesting anticipated SWOT data in their operations or decision-making environment [10], [11], [14]- [17]. The societal challenges addressed by the EAs cover such diverse topics as flood and reservoir management, fisheries and marine science, transboundary water resources, statewide water supply, and marine navigation.…”

“…With support from the SWOT science community, the program has built a formidable archive of freely available multimedia tutorials, education materials, and selfhelp resources for any user interested in exploring SWOT applications, akin to the Khan Academy or Coursera on SWOT. This archive continues to grow because of EAP's communal spirit, where fellow E A s help each other overcome their respective project hurdles in a "hack" manner [11]. The SWOT EAP has developed consistently because of continuous support from partnering space agencies CNES, NASA, and their respective data-hosting programs such as PO.DA AC and AVISO.…”

“…SWOT data will also be a pathfinder to understanding the human footprint in surface water storage variability due to water management infrastructures [8], [9]. Finally, SWOT should also have a positive societal impact in the water sector, such as disaster management, reservoir operations, water management, ecosystem services planning, hydropower and naviga-tion, fisheries (freshwater and marine), and marine shipping to name a few [10], [11].…”

Achieving Breakthroughs in Global Hydrologic Science by Unlocking the Power of Multisensor, Multidisciplinary Earth Observations

“…The power of cloud computing combined with data assimilation enables prediction of hydrologic processes between opportunities for acquisition of imagery. Therefore, demonstrating the incremental value of that new information is crucial (Bernknopf et al., 2018), as is getting feedback on data products and distribution methods (Hossain et al., 2020). We must ensure that hydrologic observations enable those who make the policies and decisions that will conserve and manage our most precious resource (Knipper et al., 2019).…”

Accelerating Applications for Planned NASA Satellite Missions: A New Paradigm of Virtual Hackathons during a Pandemic and in the Post-Pandemic Era

“…The planned Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, scheduled for launch in 2022, is one such planned satellite mission that has had an Early Adopter Program since 2018 (Hossain et al 2017(Hossain et al , 2020. The SWOT mission (Alsdorf et al 2007;Biancamaria et al 2016), jointly developed by NASA and the French national space agency (CNES) with contributions from the Canadian and UK space agencies, is designed to provide a spatially distributed and high-frequency measurement of water elevation data for the hydrology and oceanography communities for the first time (Morrow et al 2019).…”