December 2, 2016  |  321-Pickering Auditorium, 11am

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About this Lecture

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SWOT is a satellite mission to measure the elevation of water both on land and over the ocean.  It will provide information on the storage of fresh water and flow rate of rivers on land, assessing the balance of water budget in the global water cycle.  The world is facing increasing stress of water supplies.  The data products of SWOT will address the needs of water managers and policy makers.  Over the ocean the elevation of sea surface provides information on the circulation of the ocean, which stores over 90% of the heat from global warming.  The ocean’s capacity of absorbing heat and CO2 depends on the efficiency of ocean circulation at scales not resolved by the existing observations from space.  SWOT will provide observations with unprecedented spatial resolution for providing information not only important to assessing the state of future climate change but also to monitoring and prediction of coastal hazards in response to extreme weather, among other practical applications.

About

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Dr. Lee-Lueng Fu is a JPL Fellow and Senior Research Scientist.  He has been the Project Scientist for JPL’s satellite altimetry missions for oceanographic and geodetic studies since 1988, including TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Jason-2.  He is currently the Project Scientist for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission (SWOT).
 
He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. Recently he was awarded the COSPAR International Cooperation Medal for his leadership in the development and continuation of satellite altimetry missions.