read-ICESat-2

Python tools for obtaining and working with elevation data from the NASA ICESat-2 mission

• https://icesat-2.gsfc.nasa.gov
• https://icesat-2-scf.gsfc.nasa.gov
• https://nsidc.org/data/icesat-2/

ICESat-2 Data Products

Product	Name	Description
ATL00	Telemetry Data	Raw ATLAS telemetry in packet format
ATL01	Reformatted Telemetry	Parsed, partially reformatted into HDF5, generated daily, segmented into several minute granules
ATL02	Science Unit Converted Telemetry	Photon time of flight, corrected for instrument effects. Includes all photons, pointing data, spacecraft position, housekeeping data, engineering data, and raw atmospheric profiles, segmented into several minute granules.
ATL03	Global Geolocated Photon Data	Precise latitude, longitude and elevation for every received photon, arranged by beam in the along-track direction. Photons classified by signal vs. background, as well as by surface type (land ice, sea ice, land, ocean), including all geophysical corrections. Segmented into several minute granules.
ATL04	Uncalibrated Backscatter Profiles	Along-track atmospheric backscatter data, 25 times per second. Includes calibration coefficients for polar regions. Segmented into several minute granules.
ATL06	Land Ice Elevation	Surface height for each beam with along- and across-track slopes calculated for each beam pair. Posted at 40 meters along-track. Segmented into several minute granules.
ATL07	Arctic/Antarctic Sea Ice Elevation	Height of sea ice and open water leads at varying length scale based on returned photon rate for each beam presented along-track. Segmented into several minute granules.
ATL08	Land Water Vegetation Elevation	Height of ground including canopy surface posted at variable length scales relative to signal level, for each beam presented along-track. Where data permits include canopy height, canopy cover percentage, surface slope and roughness, and apparent reflectance.
ATL09	Calibrated Backscatter and Cloud Characteristics	Along-track cloud and other significant atmosphere layer heights, blowing snow, integrated backscatter, and optical depth.
ATL10	Arctic/Antarctic Sea Ice Freeboard	Estimate of sea ice freeboard over specific spatial scales using all available sea surface height measurements. Contains statistics of sea surface and sea ice heights.
ATL11	Antarctic/Greenland Ice Sheet H(t) Series	Time series of height at points on the ice sheet, calculated based on repeat tracks and/or cross-overs.
ATL12	Ocean Elevation	Surface height at specific length scale.
ATL13	Inland Water Height	Along-track inland and near shore water surface height distribution within water mask.
ATL14	Antarctic/Greenland Ice Sheet H(t) Gridded	Height maps of each ice sheet for each year based on all available elevation data.
ATL15	Antarctic/Greenland Ice Sheet dh/dt Gridded	Height change maps for each ice sheet, for each mission year, and for the whole mission.
ATL16	ATLAS Atmosphere Weekly	Polar cloud fraction, blowing snow frequency, ground detection frequency.
ATL17	ATLAS Atmosphere Monthly	Polar cloud fraction, blowing snow frequency, ground detection frequency.
ATL18	Land/Canopy Gridded	Gridded ground surface height, canopy height, and canopy cover estimates.
ATL19	Mean Sea Surface (MSS)	Gridded ocean height product.
ATL20	Arctic/Antarctic Gridded Sea Ice Freeboard	Gridded sea ice freeboard.
ATL21	Arctic/Antarctic Gridded Sea Surface Height w/in Sea Ice	Gridded monthly sea surface height inside the sea ice cover.

ICESat-2 Granules

Each orbit of ICESat-2 data is broken up into 14 granules. The granule boundaries limit the size of each ATL03 file and simplify the formation of higher level data products.

Dependencies

• numpy: Scientific Computing Tools For Python
• scipy: Scientific Tools for Python
• mpi4py: Python bindings of the Message Passing Interface (MPI)
• h5py: Python interface for Hierarchal Data Format 5 (HDF5)
• netCDF4: Python interface to the netCDF C library
• zarr: Chunked, compressed, N-dimensional arrays in Python
• pandas: Python Data Analysis Library
• scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python
• dateutil: powerful extensions to datetime
• shapely: PostGIS-ish operations outside a database context for Python
• fiona: Python wrapper for vector data access functions from the OGR library
• future: Compatibility layer between Python 2 and Python 3
• boto3: Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Python
• s3fs: Pythonic file interface to S3 built on top of botocore
• lxml: processing XML and HTML in Python
• paramiko: Native Python SSHv2 protocol library
• scp: scp module for paramiko
• yapc: Python version of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center YAPC Program

Download

The program homepage is:

https://github.com/tsutterley/read-icesat-2

A zip archive of the latest version is available directly at:

https://github.com/tsutterley/read-icesat-2/archive/main.zip

Disclaimer

This project contains work and contributions from the scientific community. This program is not sponsored or maintained by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) or NASA. It is provided here for your convenience but with no guarantees whatsoever.

License

The content of this project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Attribution license and the source code is licensed under the MIT license.