Hydrocron API - SWOT River & Lake Time Series (PO.DAAC)
Hydrocron is a NASA PO.DAAC API that repackages SWOT satellite L2 HR river reach/node and prior-lake shapefile products into CSV or GeoJSON time series, queryable by SWORD reach_id/node_id and time range with a single call.
podaac.github.io
At a glance
- Region
- United States (Global)
- Coverage
- Global
- Access
- Free
- Category
- Space Agency
- Last updated
- 2026
What's inside
- river water surface elevation
- lake water level
- SWOT
- discharge
- time series
Terms explained
What you can do with it
Typical work that data of this type supports.
- 01
Storage tracking
Follow storage and releases through the season.
Because it has: lake water level
- 02
Change over time
See how lakes and wetlands have grown or shrunk.
- 03
Design flows
Estimate 1-in-50 and 1-in-100 year floods for bridges, culverts and spillways.
Because it has: discharge
Where AI adds value
Ideas for machine learning and AI agents built on this kind of data.
- 01
Storage from space
Estimate volume from satellite water area and altimetry.
- 02
Release decisions
Optimise releases against inflow forecasts.
- 03
Flow forecasting
Train LSTM-style models on past records to forecast river levels and flow days ahead.
Machine access and documentation
Open API
REST API (AWS API Gateway/Lambda) returning GeoJSON/CSV; keyless
Licence: Open data
Listed in our registry of open water APIs, which WaterDataGPT can query live.
Related water data
- USGS WISP - What is SWOT (Surface Water Mission Portal)Global | Free
- C3S Satellite Lake Water LevelGlobal | Registration Required
- PO.DAAC Cookbook - SWOT Hydrology Data AccessGlobal | Free
- NOAA NCEI Marine Microplastics DatabaseGlobal | Free
- World Bank Water Data PortalGlobal | Free
- Adventure Scientists Global Microplastics InitiativeGlobal | Free
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