Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

This site is currently in beta, and your feedback is helping shape its ongoing development.

ABoVE: AirSWOT Ka-band Radar over Surface Waters of Alaska and Canada, 2017

Published by ORNL_DAAC | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: February 21, 2026 | Last Modified: 2026-02-17
This dataset provides AirSWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) Ka-band (35.75 GHz) radar data products collected from an airborne platform over parts of Alaska and Canada during the period 2017-07-09 to 2017-08-17. Flights targeted specific surface water features, including rivers, lakes, ponds, and wetlands in the ABoVE domain. The radar data include six products: elevation (above the WGS84 ellipsoid), incidence angle, magnitude (backscatter), interferometric correlation (coherence), DHDPHI (incidence angle dependent height sensitivity), and error (estimated height random error, 1-sigma standard deviation). The flight lines were selected to span a full spectrum of permafrost conditions (permafrost-free to continuous permafrost, low to high ground ice content), ecosystems, climatic regions, topographic relief, and geological substrates across the ABoVE domain to investigate surface water responses to thawing permafrost and spatial and temporal variability in terrestrial water storage by measuring elevation and extent of surface waters. The data are provided in two forms: 1) the original output (outer-swath products only) at 3.6 m2 resolution in UTM coordinates from the AirSWOT processing group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and 2) the ABoVE Projection at 3.6 m2 resolution, clipped to the ABoVE reference grid tiles using the C grid.

data.gov

An official website of the GSA's Technology Transformation Services

Looking for U.S. government information and services?
Visit USA.gov