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The Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission (SWOT) Prior Lake Database (PLD): Lake mask and operational auxiliaries
  • +15
  • Jida Wang,
  • Claire Pottier,
  • Cécile Cazals,
  • Marjorie Battude,
  • Yongwei Sheng,
  • Chunqiao Song,
  • Md Safat Sikder,
  • Xiao Yang,
  • Linghong Ke,
  • Marielle Gosset,
  • Rafael Reis Alencar Oliveira,
  • Manuela Grippa,
  • Félix Girard,
  • George H Allen,
  • Sylvain Biancamaria,
  • Laurence Smith,
  • Jean-François Crétaux,
  • Tamlin M Pavelsky
Jida Wang
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Corresponding Author:jidawang@ksu.edu

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Claire Pottier
Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)
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Cécile Cazals
CS Group
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Marjorie Battude
CS Group
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Yongwei Sheng
Department of Geography, University of California
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Chunqiao Song
Key Laboratory of Watershed Geographic Sciences, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Md Safat Sikder
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
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Xiao Yang
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Linghong Ke
College of Hydrology and Water Resources, Hohai University
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Marielle Gosset
Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement
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Rafael Reis Alencar Oliveira
Ceará State's Foundation for Meteorology and Water Resources (FUNCEME, UFC, UT, GET)
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Manuela Grippa
Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, Univ. Toulouse, CNRS, IRD, CNES
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Félix Girard
Géosciences Environnement Toulouse (Université de Toulouse, CNRS, IRD, CNES)
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George H Allen
Virginia Tech
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Sylvain Biancamaria
CNRS/LEGOS
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Laurence Smith
Brown University
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Jean-François Crétaux
Laboratoire d'Études en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales (LEGOS)
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Tamlin M Pavelsky
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Abstract

Lakes are the most prevalent and predominant water repositories on land surface. A primary objective of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission is to monitor the surface water elevation, area, and storage change in Earth’s lakes. To meet this objective, prior information of global lakes, such as locations and benchmark extents, is required to organize SWOT’s KaRIn observations over time for computing lake storage variation. Here, we present the SWOT mission Prior Lake Database (PLD) to fulfill this requirement. This paper emphasizes the development of the “operational PLD”, which consists of (1) a high-resolution mask of ~6 million lakes and reservoirs with a minimum area of 1 ha, and (2) multiple operational auxiliaries to assist the lake mask in generating SWOT’s standard vector lake products. We built the prior lake mask by harmonizing the UCLA Circa-2015 Global Lake Dataset and several state-of-the-art reservoir databases. Operational auxiliaries were produced from multi-theme geospatial data to provide information necessary to embody the PLD function, including lake catchments and influence areas, ice phenology, relationship with SWOT-visible rivers, and spatiotemporal coverage by SWOT overpasses. Globally, over three quarters of the prior lakes are smaller than 10 ha. Nearly 96% of the lakes, constituting over half of the global lake area, are fully observed at least once per orbit cycle. The PLD will be recursively improved during the mission period and serves as a critical framework for organizing, processing, and interpreting SWOT observations over lacustrine environments with fundamental significance to lake system science.