NASA's National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) has released ATL03 global geolocated photon data in cloud-optimized HDF5, making the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission one of NASA’s first to publish data in this format. Cloud-optimized HDF5 improves speed, scalability, and potential cost savings for cloud-based science.
Cloud-optimized HDF5 enables more efficient access to subsets of data directly from the cloud, improving performance compared to traditional files and offering potential reductions in processing time and cloud costs. The benefit is especially significant for ATL03, which has the largest file sizes in the ICESat-2 archive.
Additional cloud-optimized products, including other Level-3A and Level-3B datasets, are expected to be released later in 2025.
This achievement was driven by NSIDC DAAC in collaboration with the ICESat-2 mission, the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) Group, and the ICESat-2 user community, setting a model for other NASA missions looking to improve cloud usability for large datasets.