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SWOT Sea Surface Height Explorer

L3 LR SSH v3.0 · read live from an IceChunk store in the cloud

Drag the orange band, or drag anywhere for a new one, up to days; scroll to zoom. Ticks: days SWOT passed over the region. Click the map for the time series at a point.

The same data in your own Python

Only pip install icechunk xarray. This is the region and dates on the map.

About

SWOT maps sea surface height in two ~60 km swaths on each side of its track. This is the AVISO/DUACS Level-3 Low Rate SSH, v3.0 Basic product, on a 2 km grid: .

AVISO distributes one NetCDF file per pass. Here the whole mission is a single IceChunk store, cut in chunks of one passage by ~1000 km of track, so a region reads only the chunks that cross it, from anywhere, with icechunk and xarray.

Subset, from AWS us-east-1	This store	Downloading from AVISO
Gulf Stream 2°×2°, 3 weeks	2.7 s	17 s
Indian Ocean 10°×10°, 3 weeks	3.3 s	40 s
Across 180°, 20°×10°, 3 weeks	3.9 s	103 s
Gulf Stream 2°×2°, whole mission	7.4 s	654 s

Data and credits

"The SWOT L3_LR_SSH product, derived from the L2 SWOT KaRIn low rate ocean data products (NASA/JPL and CNES), is produced and made freely available by AVISO and DUACS teams as part of the DESMOS Science Team project." AVISO/DUACS, 2024. SWOT Level-3 KaRIn Low Rate SSH Basic (v3.0) [Data set]. CNES. doi:10.24400/527896/A01-2023.017. Licensed by CNES under the AVISO License.

Changes made here: the files are combined into one store, descending passes are turned to run south to north, and along/cross-track distances and per-pass geometry are added. The map shows averages of the passages on screen pixels, by default minus the mean over the region; time series are means within a radius. This tool is not endorsed by CNES, AVISO or DUACS.

Bathymetry: GEBCO Compilation Group, served by NOAA NCEI. Code: github.com/iuryt/swot_icechunk.