GLAS HDF5: Aligning ICESat 1 Release 33 Data with Future Missions

NASA has undertaken the creation of ICESat/GLAS Release 33 data in the Hieratical Data Format 5 (HDF5) encoding. This conversion makes the Release 33 data available in the same format as several future NASA missions, including ICESat 2 and Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP). The plan is that this will make ICESat 1 Release 33 data more accessible to a broader user community. Each GLA product (1-15) will have a corresponding HDF5 product, with the related parameters in each product arranged in groups. Attributes are added to each parameter making the products self-documenting. The waveform data will be "uncompressed" by carrying relative time of sample values. Because of the importance of having consistent and adequately defined metadata across products and missions, the ICESat team made efforts to have these HDF products follow CF metadata conventions at the granule and parameter levels. The products have also been made NetCDF-4 friendly. Conversion of ICESat/GLAS Release 33 data to HDF5 format is expected to be completed during the Fall of 2012. GLAS Release 33 data in HDF5 format will be available at NSIDC.