NASA ICESat Project: Level-1A to Level-2 Laser Altimetry and Atmospheric Data

NASA's ICESat Project data includes Level-1A to Level-2 products from the GLAS instrument, providing transmitted and received waveforms, atmospheric backscatter profiles, engineering data, laser pointing, and surface elevations. The data is hosted on AWS Open Data and is licensed under CC-BY-4.0. Each data granule has an associated browse product.

Use Cases

• Calculate ice sheet elevation changes based on the Level-1B Global Elevation (GLAH06) product.
• Analyze atmospheric aerosol and cloud vertical structure using the Level-2 aerosol data (GLAH10).
• Characterize surface slope and roughness from waveform parameterization data (GLAH05).
• Calibrate instrument readings using satellite housekeeping and laser pointing data (GLAH03, GLAH04).

Strengths

• Includes multiple calibrated data products (Level-1A to Level-2) for comprehensive analysis.
• Data granules contain approximately 190 minutes (2 orbits) of data, providing substantial temporal coverage per file.
• Waveform characterization includes algorithms tuned for different surfaces (ice sheets, land, ocean, sea ice).

Limitations

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

Provenance

Source

NASA

Collection Method

Collected by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) on the ICESat satellite.

Time Range

null

Freshness

null

Geography

Global