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.
NASA’s 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.
In this webinar, we will provide an overview of the reference ICESat-2 sea ice data products. These include the along-track sea ice height and freeboard products (ATL07 and ATL10), as well as the derived gridded products ATL20 and ATL21. We will demonstrate earthaccess, a Python package to search for and access NASA data, including ICESat-2 datasets, both in the cloud and from your local machine. Lastly, we will present specific data use cases, including the derivation of sea ice thickness and applications in sea ice and climate modeling.
To view the first three NASA ICESat-2 data trainings:
Webinar 3: Laser Altimetry Applications for a Changing World: Working with ICESat-2 Bathymetry Data
Webinar 1: Laser Altimetry Applications for a Changing World: Explore ICESat-2 Data