SWOT Level 2 Water Mask Pixel Cloud Auxiliary Data Product, Version D

The SWOT Level 2 Water Mask Pixel Cloud Auxiliary Data Product (SWOT_L2_HR_PIXCVec_D) provides per-feature attributes for surface water bodies identified from the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) measurements collected by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. This auxiliary product complements the Level 2 Pixel Cloud (PIXC) product by assigning individual water pixels to hydrologic features such as river reaches and lakes, and summarizing key scalar quantities for each feature.

Each granule corresponds to one KaRIn high-rate tile (~64 × 64 km²), covering either the left or right swath, and contains georeferenced attributes for each identified water body. These include averaged and derived quantities such as water surface height, area, width, and slope, along with identifiers that enable linkage to external hydrologic databases and to features in other SWOT data products. The data are distributed in NetCDF-4 format and follow Climate and Forecast (CF) metadata conventions.

The PIXCVec product is designed to support hydrologic analysis by structuring the raw pixel cloud data (PIXC) into meaningful, feature-based summaries. It enables downstream applications such as river discharge estimation and time series analysis of water surface elevation for lakes and rivers, and is particularly useful for studies requiring consistent tracking of water body features over time.