ICE SHEET ELEVATION MAPPING AND CHANGE DETECTION WITH THE ICE, CLOUD AND LAND ELEVATION SATELLITE-2

Abstract

On September 15, 2018, ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation satellite) was successfully launched to measure ice sheet and glacier elevation change, sea ice freeboard, and vegetation. This paper describes the computation of surface elevation change rates obtained with SERAC (Surface Elevation Reconstruction And Change detection) from ICESat-2 observations. After summarizing some relevant aspects of ICESat-2 and its sole instrument ATLAS (Advanced Topographic Laser Altimetry System) the paper focuses on how we calculate time series of elevation change rates from ICESat-2’s data product ATL03. Since real ICESat-2 data suitable for generating time series of several time epochs are not yet available, we used simulated data for this study. We will start generating time series from real ICESat-2 data after the conclusion of the ongoing calibration and validation phase and we expect to present real-world examples at the WG III/9 meeting in June, 2019 in Enschede, The Netherlands.