Swath Width

Swath width is the ground-track width of the area imaged by a satellite sensor during one orbital pass. It is determined by the sensor's field of view and orbital altitude. There is a fundamental trade-off between swath width and spatial resolution: a wider swath covers more area per orbit (reducing revisit time for global coverage) but each pixel must cover a larger ground area (lower resolution). Sentinel-2's multispectral imager has a 290 km swath at 10 m resolution. WorldView-3's high-resolution sensor covers only 13 km at 30 cm resolution. SAR sensors can adjust swath width by switching between imaging modes (stripmap, ScanSAR, spotlight).