NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) was launched in September 2018 to measure the heights of all surfaces across the globe, including land ice, sea ice, oceans, water, and vegetation. ICESat-2 carries a photon-counting laser altimeter to measure these surfaces, providing measurements every 70 centimeters along the platform’s ground path at a rate of 10,000 laser pulses per second. The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) distributes ICESat-2 data products in the NASA Earthdata Cloud, along with an abundance of learning resources for users to visualize, access, and customize each data product. 

This webinar is the first in a four-part series to introduce the ICESat-2 platform. Topics in this first webinar include an overview of the platform, data products and data discovery, and data access tools. A demonstration will showcase the advanced data discovery and data visualization features of OpenAltimetry—a web-based application that provides on-demand surface elevation profiles. Future webinars will focus on specific ICESat-2 data products and their applications.