Global Surface Water Density Masks to Refine Sentinel 3 Data Acquisitions

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission is part of the first generation of Copernicus satellites and was set out to deliver operationally high quality measurements over ocean, land, and atmosphere. The European Space Agency (ESA) is now studying concepts for the Next Generation Sentinel-3 Topography (S3NG-T) mission that would launch in the 2032+ time period. In order to meet the primary objectives of the S3NG-T mission requirement document a complex analysis of river and lake targets is required to size the satellite mass memory and downlink system. We have adopted a different approach that derives a non-conservative mask of water density that defines a more useful user friendly approach to specifying where river and lake targets are located. Within this work, the design and construction of our water density maps as well as application examples are discussed. The results prove an easy-to-apply methodology to create global surface water density maps using high-resolution water body maps. The work further illustrates different use cases to optimize data sizing considering constraints such as global coverage, river width, and total data volume.