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Topohack 2019

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Taking ICESat-2 to the mountains: a workflow using satellite laser altimetry to resolve topography over complex terrain

Background

Objectives

• Create general workflow to extract elevation profiles from ICESat-2 ATL06 product over complex terrain and compare with existing fine-resolution DEM datasets

Goals

• Learn how to download the ICESat-2 data by lat lon bounding box
• Create library with some basic convenience functions
• Convert the HDF5 file to xarray and geopandas/shapely polygons
• Explore OpenAltimetry and utility with multiple locations and time periods
• Explore ATL03 and ATL06 products and theoretical basis
• Learn how to subset ATL03 and ATL06 data based on flags
• Intersect ICESat-2 tracks with RGI glacier polygons to get a sense of bare ground coverage near glaciers.
• Evaluate/Compare the topography resolved by ICESat-2 profiles along steep mountains with topographic profiles returned from high-resolution DEMs.
• Get a sense of snow accumulation (depth) by comparing Snow-off DEM over Grand Mesa with winter (October to February) IceSat-2 collects.
• Create notebook that shows how to pull all cloud-free data for entire mission for target area bounding box.

Methods/Planned Approach

Tools/Libraries

numpy
scipy
rasterio
pandas
geopandas

Collaborators

Vibhor Agarwal
Michelle Hu
Friedrich Knuth
HP Marshall
Justin Pflug
Mariama Dryak
Will Kochtitzky

Team Lead:

Shashank Bhushan

Data Science Leads:

Joe Meyer
Amy Steicker

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References

ATL06 technical references