Delta-X: AirSWOT L2 Geocoded Water Surface Elevation, MRD, LA, 2021, V3

This dataset contains Level 2 (L2) AirSWOT geocoded products, including estimated water surface elevation. The AirSWOT instrument is a Ka-band interferometer and for this study is flown on the King Air B200 platform. Data were collected during the DeltaX airborne campaign over the Atchafalaya and Terrebonne basins of the Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana, USA. Flights occurred during the Delta-X Spring 2021 deployment from 2021-03-26 to 2021-04-18 and the Delta-X Fall 2021 deployment from 2021-08-21 to 2021-09-12. AirSWOT is capable of producing high resolution (3.6 m) digital elevation models over land and water bodies using near-nadir wide-swath Ka-band radar interferometry to measure water-surface elevation and produce continuous gridded elevation data. The instrument includes six antennas that form multiple baseline pairs for along-track and across-track interferometry. AirSWOT elevation data are useful for calibrating elevation and slopes along the main channels, as well as tying observations to open ocean tidal conditions and is an airborne calibration and validation instrument for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite. This Version 3 dataset provides updated data files due to an updated Calumet survey that changed the water level by 0.138 m. This resulted in all the AirSWOT water levels changing by that same amount. For these L2 products, only the estimated water surface elevation in respect to the WGS84 ellipsoid surface, and estimated height above the NAVD88 (GEOID12B) vertical datum files changed. Note that data acquired on September 1 and September 5, 2021 do not meet the expected MAE in-situ comparison and should be used with caution. This dataset contains cloud optimized GeoTIFF rasters in UTM map coordinates for each flight line. In addition, a text file provides basic metadata, including flight line ID, start and end UTC times of data acquisition, processor version number, and the date and time of different processing stages.