Ice Sheet Surface Topography from ICESat Altimetry
Abstract
Over 150 days of data have been collected by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) on-board NASA's Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat). The unprecedented precision and accuracy of this dataset are excellent for creating high quality Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The second generation of 5km ice sheet DEMs demonstrate improvements over their predecessors due to better attitude calibrations and data processing. Another key to improved ICESat DEMs is a better understanding of GLAS data editing. Complete Antarctica and Greenland 5km DEMs are shown as well as higher resolution models in the high latitude regions. Aircraft Laser Data from the NASA/WFF Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) is used as a reference to demonstrate ICESat DEM improvements over radar altimetry DEMs. Several different gridding methods including averaging, spline fitting, and biquadratic interpolation are compared.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004AGUFM.C33B0347D
- Keywords:
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- 1827 Glaciology (1863);
- 1863 Snow and ice (1827);
- 1640 Remote sensing