NASA Operation IceBridge: Airborne Lidar and Imagery of Polar Sea Ice

NASA's Operation IceBridge aircraft survey campaigns collected geolocated waveforms of Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic sea ice using the Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) near-infrared lidar. The data set also contains raw and high-resolution imagery from the Continuous Airborne Mapping By Optical Translator (CAMBOT) system over the same regions. These data complement green-wavelength ATM elevation measurements and are hosted on AWS under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Analyzing sea ice thickness and morphology based on lidar waveform data
• Calibrating or validating satellite-derived ice measurements using high-resolution airborne imagery
• Studying changes in polar ice cover over time by combining this data with other IceBridge measurements
• Developing algorithms for processing near-infrared lidar returns from ice surfaces

Strengths

• Data is geolocated, providing precise spatial context for analysis
• Includes complementary sensor data (ATM lidar and CAMBOT imagery) from the same campaigns
• Covers key polar regions (Greenland, Arctic, Antarctic) critical for climate research

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified

Provenance

Source

NASA Operation IceBridge

Collection Method

Acquired via aircraft survey campaigns using the Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) instrument suite.

Time Range

unknown

Freshness

unknown

Geography

Greenland, Arctic, Antarctic