ICESat-2 Over Antarctica and Greenland: First Evaluation of Land-Ice Elevation Products
Abstract
ICESat-2 is expected to launch in mid-September 2018, beginning a three-year mission to map elevation change of the Earth's cryosphere with unprecedented precision and detail. By December 2018, ICESat-2 will have nearly completed the first of its 91-day repeat cycles, and a beta version of the data products will have been generated. This presentation describes early evaluation of these data over land ice. In it, we show preliminary ICESat-2 land-ice elevation measurements, and give a survey of how the measurement quality relates to surface and atmospheric conditions. We demonstrate how these measurements continue the 25-year record of laser-altimetry data that includes ICESat and continue with Operation IceBridge, and discuss how a combination of self-consistency calculations and calibrations against concurrent laser-altimetry and GPS measurements let us quantify the accuracy and precision of the data. Last, we describe higher-level products that will, later in the mission, combine multiple cycles of ICESat-2 data to map elevation changes of the ice sheets, and show simulations of these products based on currently available data.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.C22A..05S
- Keywords:
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- 0726 Ice sheets;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0758 Remote sensing;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0762 Mass balance;
- CRYOSPHEREDE: 0776 Glaciology;
- CRYOSPHERE