AUSTRALIA AUSTRALIA IN IN SPACE SPACE
Pioneering oceansensing satellite to benefit Australia’s Blue Economy
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
By Shane Keating, Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney
A
ustralia's $80B “Blue Economy” will receive a boost later this year from a pioneering new US-French ocean-se nsing satellite. The $1.5B Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will carry a ground-breaking new radar altimeter that will map sea-surface elevation and ocean currents at 10 times the resolution of present-day instruments. This increase in resolving power – analogous to jumping from the earliest days of television to HDTV – will unveil ocean currents that are critical for coastal and maritime industries. “Today, satellite altimetry measures sea level variations and ocean currents, but even with multiple satellites in flight, we can only construct maps of the larger features”, says Australian researcher Rosemary Morrow, who is leading the oceanography component of the mission. “SWOT aims to provide global observations of the smaller-scale currents --- it’s a missing link”.
Essential satellite data Satellite remote sensing data is crucial to ensure Australia’s economic prosperity, maritime safety, climate resilience, and national security. Marine industries such as offshore oil and gas,
40 | Australia in Space Magazine
fisheries, tourism, and shipping support 340,000 FTE jobs nationally and are forecast to grow to $100B/yr by 2025. These industries rely on satellite geospatial data to drive accurate and timely ocean forecasts for decision-making and risk assessment. The workhorse of ocean remote sensing is satellite altimetry, which has provided continuous global measurements of sea-surface height (SSH) for the past 25 years. These data are routinely used by meteorological agencies around the world for ocean forecasting and form part of the “backbone” of essential satellite data for global numerical weather prediction and ocean forecasts. In Australia, altimetry data are used by the Bureau of Meteorology’s operational forecast model, Bluelink, which supports search-and-rescue and safety-ofnavigation services and delivers geospatial information in support of Defence, marine conservation activities, and fisheries management.
A Grand Challenge for ocean remote sensing Once it becomes operational, the SWOT mission will provide the first 2D maps of the ocean surface at horizontal scales of 1-10 km. This regime of ocean dynamics --- called the