Real Time Surface Water Images

[malcolm_makoaent.com]

I am new to Earthdata and currently investigating the current surface water conditions in the Etosha-Okavango basin area of Angola. Could you advise me on the search for a product that would give me near real time information about the surface water conditions? I would like to understand how the surface water at this time of year affects the access conditions to local communities.

[LANCE - slayback]

The NASA Global Flood Product (MCDWD) might be useful for tracking this, if/when cloud conditions are not problematic; this product relies on optical imagery, so clouds will block detection of surface water and floods. For more details, please see: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/instruments/viirs/near-real-time-data/nrt-global-flood-products (which includes a link to the detailed product User Guide).

The 2 and 3-day composite products are viewable in Worldview: https://go.nasa.gov/globalflood

The 1-day composite can be more timely because it only uses the imagery from the product date (and is generated within 3 hours of imagery collection), but can also suffer from cloud-shadow false-positives - please see the discussion in the User Guide about this. The 1-day is not viewable in Worldview, but is available in the downloadable HDF and geotiff product files.