The SWOT Level 2 KaRIn High Rate Raster Product (SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_D) provides rasterized estimates of water surface elevation, inundation extent, and radar backscatter derived from high-resolution radar observations by the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) on the SWOT satellite. This product aggregates the irregularly spaced pixel cloud data from the PIXC and PIXCVec products onto a uniform geographic grid to facilitate spatial analysis of water surface features across inland, estuarine, and coastal domains.
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Standard granules cover non-overlapping 128 × 128 km² scenes in the UTM projection at 100 m and 250 m resolution, stored in NetCDF-4 format. Each file contains 2D image layers representing water surface elevation (corrected for geoid, solid Earth, load, and pole tides, as well as atmospheric and ionospheric path delays), surface area, water fraction, and sigma0, along with quality flags and uncertainty estimates. On-demand versions are available at user-specified resolutions and projections, with optional overlapping granules and GeoTIFF output via SWODLR: https://swodlr.podaac.earthdatacloud.nasa.gov/
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The raster product offers a gridded alternative to the unstructured pixel cloud, supporting hydrologic and geomorphic analyses in complex flow environments such as braided rivers, floodplains, wetlands, and coastal zones. It enables consistent spatiotemporal sampling while reducing noise through spatial aggregation, making it especially suitable for applications that require map-like continuity or integration with geospatial models.<br>
This dataset is the parent collection to the following sub-collections: <br>
https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_100m_D <br>
https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_250m_D <br>