Land ice applications: Getting familiar with ICESat-2 products over land ice

1. Introduction

In this tutorial, we're going to take a first look at some of the ICESat-2 data over land ice. We're going to demonstrate how ALT06 segments correspond to ATL03 photons, and demonstrate the repeat-track structure of ATL06 data. '

1.1 Learning goals

Our learning goals include understanding:

• how ice-sheet surfaces are represented by ATL03 photons
• how ATL06 elevations correpond to ATL03 photon clouds
• how small-scale features appear in ATL06
• the repeat structure of ATL06
• how cross-track slope can affect elevation differences and we'll also give:
• a sneak peak at the ATL11 product.

1.2 Tools presented and developed:

Along the way, we'll present:

• A reader for ATL03
• A reader for ATL06
• Geographic projections with pyproj
• Filtering ATL06 elevations using slope and quality parameters
• Mapping surface elevations and profiles with matplotlib
• Visualizing ATL03 and ATL06 together.

Content for this tutorial is in the notebooks/land_ice_applications.ipynb notebook