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About the speaker:

Louise Maubant is a geodesist specializing in tectonic and hydrologic issues and applying remote sensing technologies, particularly InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar). During her PhD, she concentrated on the seismic cycle along the Mexican subduction zone, integrating InSAR and GPS data to investigate transient slip events and overall seismic behavior. She tackled a significant research challenge: decomposing geodetic time series signals to distinguish tectonic movements from other disturbances. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Water Futures and the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences (RSES), Louise now focuses on monitoring hydrologic changes using geodetic data from space. Her work aims to enhance our understanding of water resources and their management through innovative remote sensing techniques.

About the seminar:

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission provides an unparalleled ability to measure global surface water resources. Utilising a Ka band Radar Interferometer (KaRIN), SWOT provides high resolution SAR data with high coherence over both the oceans, and terrestrial water bodies such as lakes and rivers. These measurements of water surface elevation are essential for water monitoring and management in remote regions, and to further study the impact of climate change on water resources. The SWOT data consists of products with different spatial resolutions and vertical uncertainties. In this study we provide a comparison between the high-resolution (HR) SWOT products and in-situ gauges for a range of surface water systems in Australia. A mean water surface elevation is calculated from SWOT measurements that are within ~1 km of in-situ gauges for large water bodies such as lakes and reservoirs, while measurements within 250 m of a gauge are used for rivers. The values are filtered to remove any suspect data, retaining only good quality measurements. For large water bodies in Australia there is very good agreement, with an RMSE of under 10 cm between the SWOT products and the in-situ gauges. When observing smaller water bodies, SWOT maintains this level of accuracy until the size of the water body decreases to below the resolution of the SWOT products. We also compare different SWOT products (RiverSP and Raster) to determine the product which yields the most accurate estimates of water elevation for the Murray River Basin. Along with the vertical accuracy, the high spatial resolution of SWOT highlights its capacity to observe Australian rivers, which are typically small, as well as small lakes and on farm reservoirs, which are largely ungauged and unmonitored.

You can also join via Zoom:

https://anu.zoom.us/j/6633934183?pwd=ZnJnelcxUDZJcXNSOTBraTU2d0kwUT09&omn=83847370092

Meeting ID: 663 393 4183

Password: 462534