The American space agency NASA has launched a satellite that is expected to change the way we think about water on Earth.

The Swot mission will map the precise elevation of rivers, reservoirs and lakes, and track ocean surface features on an unprecedented scale. This should improve flood and drought forecasts and help researchers better understand how the climate is changing, BBC writes.

The launch for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission came from California. The satellite was lifted by a Falcon rocket. Swot is led primarily by NASA and Cnes, the French space agency, with contributions from the UK and Canadian space agencies.

It will be several months before Swot is fully operational; its French-made Ka-band radar interferometer has long arms that must first be unpacked.

The satellite has the ability to explore all rivers with a width of at least 100 m and all lakes larger than 6 hectares. “For example, only 10 out of 1,000 lakes have been well surveyed. We will explore millions of lakes,” mission scientists say. In the ocean, Swot will see bulges and depressions on the surface of the water associated with currents and whirlpools up to 20 km in size. Swot will give water heights to the nearest 10 cm.

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