NASA WWAO is seeking ideas that could address key water needs identified in the Missouri River Basin. Submit your ideas! Deadline January 15, 2025, at 3 pm PST. Reach out to us with questions at water.applications@jpl.nasa.gov .

This Request for Information (RFI) follows a Needs Assessment in the Missouri that identified high-priority data gaps and information needs for water management in the Basin. 21 specific needs and use cases were outlined in the report, covering watershed health and management, water availability, water quality, agriculture and irrigation, and water infrastructure.  

In December 2022, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite flew into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Jointly developed by NASA and CNES(Centre National D'Études Spatiales), with contributions from CSA (Canadian Space Agency) and the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA), SWOT's mission is to monitor Earth’s surface water with unprecedented detail and accuracy, capturing the first global survey of the planet's surface water.

In March 2024, the SWOT team released a suite of pre-validated Level 1 and Level 2 hydrology and oceanography datasets offering terrestrial water surface elevation, slope, width, area, sea surface height, significant wave height and wind speed measurements, and more.

Explore some of the mission resources below:

• SWOT hydrology data products
• Webinar on the SWOT mission
• NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission Data Release
• Python Jupyter Notebook tutorials for accessing SWOT data - take a look at the “Access and Visualization” Notebooks on this page for end-to-end examples
• Data access workshop
• SWOT Early Career Researcher Workshop

Started in April 2021, the Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory collects data from satellite radar and optical instruments to generate six types of data:

1. near-global Surface Water Extent product suite;
2. near-global Surface Disturbance product suite;
3. near-global Radiometric Terrain Corrected product;
4. North America Coregistered Single Look complex product suite;
5. North America Displacement product suite;
6. North America Vertical Land Motion product suite.

1 and 2 are generated from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical data. 3 and 4 are derived from SAR data only, while 5 is generated from Interferometric SAR (InSAR) data. 6 is generated from InSAR data fused to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data. The OPERA data products and time series are derived from measurements made by the instruments onboard the Sentinel-1 A/B, Sentinel-2 A/B, and Landsat-8/9 satellites, to be augmented by the measurements from the soon-to-be-launched NISAR and Sentinel-1 C satellites.

All OPERA products can be accessed through the links on our data products page.

NASA WWAO hosted its inaugural Annual Meeting in Boulder, CO earlier this year. Peruse the diverse range of talks here. Thanks to everyone who joined us - what a vibrant gathering! We look forward to doing it again next year.

NASA WWAO partnered with NASA's Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) to help deliver a four-part training series focused on drought monitoring, prediction and projection using NASA Earth data. WWAO and some of its drought projects were featured in the final session. Thanks to ARSET for a fantastic training series and to the hundreds of people around the world who took part in real-time. Dive into the learning modules here.

NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean, Ecosystem (PACE) mission on February, 8 2024. A new online training course is going on now on how PACE can help water-quality monitoring through its collection of global, hyperspectral observations.

Enroll here.

Take a look at our Science Publications page, where you can dig into some of the scientific research in which WWAO and its partners are involved. Publications are related to WWAO's water projects or the work of partners and collaborators within our community.

AGU will host its annual meeting – the largest gathering of Earth and space scientists – in Washington, DC, December 9-13, 2024, and there will be plenty of talk on water, space and Earth data.

WWAO is connected to a number of AGU events including:

• A session with NASA's Water Resources Program on "From Space to Solutions: Satellite Earth Observations for Resilient Water Resources Management";
• A talk on "Maximizing the Use of NASA Earth Observations for Water Management";
• The Indigenous Peoples Initiative session: "Connect, Commit, Sustain: A Long-term Approach to Building the Capacity of Indigenous Communities to use NASA Earth Observations";

Hope to see you there!

Join us at the AMS 105th Annual Meeting, “Towards a Thriving Planet: Charting the Course Across Scales,” taking place January 12–16, 2025, at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.

We are excited to announce that our presentation, “From Science to Decisions: Supporting Water Management with Earth Observations” has been accepted for the American Meteorological Society’s 15th Conference on the Transition of Research to Operations (15R2O). This session will explore innovative ways to support water management using Earth observations and satellite data.

Session Title: 17b Responsive Science: User-Centered Approaches to Applied Research, Innovation, and Developing Capabilities to Support Stakeholder Decision Making II
Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Session Start Time: 4:30 PM (Central)
Presentation Time: 5:15 PM (Central)

Don’t miss your chance—register now for the 105th AMS Annual Meeting!

Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida as a Category 3 storm, bringing serious storm surge and drenching rains to the middle of the state. Given that discussions of the hurricane’s dangers had focused on flooding, rainfall and heavy winds, residents farther south were surprised to receive a barrage of tornado warnings—more than 100, all told—from local National Weather Service offices.

Communities across the Southeast U.S. are reeling in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which is likely to make history as one of the country’s most destructive disasters on record.

The major storm brought heavy precipitation and destructive flooding to coastal Florida and southeastern states.

The storm, which drenched coastal British Columbia and southeastern Alaska, may be among the region’s most intense in the past couple of decades.

California continues to adapt to increasingly extreme weather, with swings from dry conditions to dangerous flooding. Its Department of Water Resources is awarding $1.4M in funding for nine state emergency response agencies across the state to increase their ability to respond to floods.

The U.S. Interagency Task Force on Sea Level Change has launched the U.S. Sea Level Change website. Designed to help communities prepare for rising seas, the site features the latest science on changing sea levels, details about the impact on the environment and coastal communities, and strategies to mitigate the consequences.

Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs long strained by overuse now face climate change. Some cities are turning to water restrictions to get back on track.

The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations. But for the Yurok tribe, the river's restoration is only just beginning – starting with 18 billion seeds.

Transboundary assessments of water security typically adopt an ‘upstream’ perspective, focusing on vulnerabilities occurring within a given hydrological basin. However, a new study pinpoints the need to account for upwind moisture dependencies in water risk assessments, since moisture that provided precipitation in a basin probably originates upwind.