NASA's SWOT satellite revolutionizes scientists' ability to forecast sea level rise

Hundreds of thousands of Californians live near the coastline, but some of their prime real estate is on track to go from a waterfront to underwater.

However, these residents have a glimmer of hope coming from one of NASA's new satellites. 

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography Satellite (SWOT) launched last year. It gives scientists an unprecedented view of not only how much the sea level is rising but how fast it happening.

"SWOT is just going to give us information where we didn't have it before," NASA researcher Ben Hamlington said. 

Hamlington, a scientist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has studied sea level rise for decades. Until SWOT, the best image he could get of most of the planet was a blurry picture showing nothing more than the ocean. Now, the transformational new technology details the story of the planet's changing in real time.

"It's like putting glasses on, being able to see the picture that was previously kind of blurry, but now we're seeing in fine detail," Hamlington said.

The spacecraft will scan over 90% of the planet every 21 days, providing a high-resolution view of the changing coastlines that may affect about 200,000 Californians. 

"With SWOT, we had very high expectations for what it might provide and think in a lot of cases is exceeding those expectations," Hamlington said.

The initial imaging from SWOT astounded researchers, showing details of the ocean's intricacies that have allowed scientists to determine how the coastline is changing.

"We're going to see a significant increase in the amount of flooding just in the next two to three decades, so it's not a really distant problem," Hamlington said. "We're seeing impacts now and we're expecting to see a very rapid increase in the impacts just in the next 20 to 30 years."

This data is essential to the plans surrounding the rising sea levels. For example, at Orange County's Balboa Island the city raised the seawall by nine inches to help with flooding. SWOT can help officials better prepare for flood events and give them a better understanding of the timeline to make changes.

"There's a wide range of adaptation strategies that you can implement," Hamlington said. "You can certainly put rocks, coastal defenses ... sea walls are a possible solution."

With meteorologists expecting a strong El Nino year in combination with king tides, flooding may become an issue for areas like Malibu. Coastal erosion, damage to infrastructure and landslides are just a few of the issues that SWOT forecasting can help with.

In the next 30 years, Earth will see as much sea level rise as it's seen in the past 100 years and it will only increase faster, according to the current projections. 

"It's like putting your foot on the accelerators of a car," Hamlington said. "You're putting your foot on the gas, and that's really what we're doing with sea level rise along the coastlines. We're going to see all those impacts that we see now start to increase in frequency and severity — the flooding, the erosion."

While scientists believe humanity cannot stop sea level rise, it's possible to at least slow it down. It'll take the entire planet to limit carbon emissions, which are ultimately responsible for our rising ocean levels, which are already posing a potentially deadly threat.

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