The ESA River & Lake System: Current Capabilities and Future Potential

Measuring the earth's river and lake resources using satellite radar altimetry offers a unique global monitoring capability, which complements the detailed measurements made by the steadily decreasing number of in-situ gauges. To exploit this unique remote monitoring capability, a global pilot scheme was implemented in 2005 to derive river and lake surface height measurements from multi-mission satellite radar altimetry.

Near-Real-Time (NRT) products from the Jason-2 satellite altimeter are automatically generated based on data acquired daily from CNES; allowing for estimates of river and lake heights within 3 days of the satellite measurement. Other altimeter missions such as Jason-1 and Envisat have previously produced NRT results.

Envisat RA-2 provided results for 1850 targets globally, with an additional 58 targets available from Jason-2. Recent improvements in delineation of waterbodies within a global mask allowed for the production of more than 500 new historical timeseries from the Envisat satellite, made freely available to the scientific community.