Zhang et al. (2026) SWOT Wide-Swath Altimetry for Inland-Water Remote Sensing: Applications, Challenges, and Prospects—A Systematic Bibliometric and Thematic Review

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Identification

• Journal: Remote Sensing
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-09-22
• Authors: Zhuolin Zhang, Yonghua Sun, Zhixin Jiang, Shiyan Gao, Dinglin Xu, Xue Yang, Ruozeng Wang, Jinkun Zong
• DOI: 10.3390/rs18193274

Research Groups

• Laboratoire d'Études en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales (LEGOS)
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Short Summary

This review synthesizes 556 publications on the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, highlighting its evolution from pre-launch algorithm development to post-launch validation and application. The study reports variable water-surface-elevation performance across different contexts.

Objective

• Investigate the state of research on the SWOT mission, focusing on data products, water-surface-elevation retrieval, river-discharge estimation, hydrological applications, uncertainty, and multi-mission integration.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Global to regional scales, with a focus on inland waters.
• Temporal Scale: January 2019 to April 2026 (bibliometric analysis) and post-launch studies.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: ISBA (Interactions between Soil, Biosphere, and Atmosphere) model, mHM (Maximun Hydrology Model), etc.
• Data sources: Satellite data from SWOT, ICESat-2, and other complementary missions.

Main Results

• Variable water-surface-elevation performance across different contexts: mean RMSE of 0.29 m for Yangtze River stations, MAE below 0.10 m for Tibetan Plateau lakes against ICESat-2, and MAE of 6.7 cm for 1 km2-averaged elevations in herbaceous wetlands.
• Uncertainty remains high in river-discharge estimation due to bathymetry, roughness, channel geometry, slope estimation, and temporal sampling.

Contributions

• This review provides a comprehensive overview of the SWOT mission's research evolution and study-level evidence on its data products and applications.
• It highlights the need for standardized and reproducible processing, uncertainty-aware validation, cross-regional benchmarking, and integration with complementary satellite observations and hydrological or hydraulic models.

Funding

• Not specified in the provided text.

Citation

@article{Zhang2026SWOT,
  author = {Zhang, Zhuolin and Sun, Yonghua and Jiang, Zhixin and Gao, Shiyan and Xu, Dinglin and Yang, Xue and Wang, Ruozeng and Zong, Jinkun},
  title = {SWOT Wide-Swath Altimetry for Inland-Water Remote Sensing: Applications, Challenges, and Prospects—A Systematic Bibliometric and Thematic Review},
  journal = {Remote Sensing},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3390/rs18193274},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18193274}
}