Contributor

Xiao Yang

Subject Area

Geography

Abstract

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, launched in December 2022, is designed for global survey of Earth’s surface water. However, the seasonal freezing of lakes and rivers combined with SWOT’s unique interferometric radar characteristics presents a valuable opportunity to assess its potential for river and lake ice applications. In this dissertation, I first compare backscatter characteristics over open water and frozen lakes and rivers. I demonstrate strong contrast in backscatter between water and ice while accounting for incidence angle, highlighting SWOT’s capability to discriminate between surface cover types. However, overlapping backscatter signatures suggest further investigation of drivers of these variations such as ice and snow conditions. I then evaluate SWOT’s ice surface height with in-situ GNSS data collected from rivers and lakes near Fairbanks, Alaska. Results demonstrate varying agreement with root-mean-square errors of approximately 0.66m for rivers and 0.23m for lakes. Varying agreement emphasize the need for continued assessment of SWOT’s elevation products across a broader range of water bodies and through diverse validation approaches. Overall, SWOT demonstrates promising capabilities for both ice detection and ice surface height retrieval, positioning it as an exciting tool for sub-Arctic hydrology and broader cryosphere applications

Degree Date

Summer 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Department

Earth Sciences

Advisor

Xiao Yang

Second Advisor

Zhong Lu

Third Advisor

Stephen Arrowsmith

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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