NASA launched its Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) in January 2003. The primary goal of this laser altimeter mission is to provide determination of volumetric changes in the ice sheets, specifically in Antarctica and Greenland. The instrument performance requirements are driven by the scientific goal of determining a change in elevation on the centimetre level over the course of...

[1] To provide validation of the ICESat laser altimeter time of measurement and geolocation, a ground-based technique was implemented at White Sands Space Harbor (WSSH), during the Laser 2a and 3a operational periods. The activities used an electro-optical detection system and a passive array of corner cube retro reflectors (CCR). The detectors and the CCRs were designed to provide an independe...

[1] We present a new approach to derive control information from ICESat data that enables rigorous registration of aerial and satellite imagery. The technique, based on matching terrain features identified from ICESat measurements and aerial imagery, opens the door to transform results of previous studies to a global reference frame. We demonstrate the proposed methodology with historical aeria...

Leaf area index (LAI) and vertical foliage profile (VFP) are among the important canopy structural variables. Recent advances in lidar remote sensing technology have demonstrated the capability of accurately mapping LAI and VFP over large areas. The primary objective of this study was to derive and validate a LAI and VFP product over the contiguous United States (CONUS) using spaceborne wavefor...

The Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-II (ICESat-2) mission has been selected by NASA as a Decadal Survey mission, to be launched in 2016. Mission objectives are to measure land ice elevation, sea ice freeboard/ thickness and changes in these variables and to collect measurements over vegetation that will facilitate determination of canopy height, with an accuracy that will allow predicti...

In October 2003 a campaign on board the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis had the objective to validate standard Aqua Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) sea-ice products. Additionally, the satellite laser altimeter on the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) was in operation. To capture the large-scale information on the sea-ice conditions necessary for satellite v...

Since 2003 the spaceborne laser altimetry system on board of NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has acquired a large world-wide database of full waveform data organized in 15 products. In this research three products are evaluated over The Netherlands. For this purpose the raw full waveform product, the derived Gaussian decomposition product and the global land evaluation p...

In this study, six Arctic sea ice thickness products are compared: the AVHRR Polar Pathfinder-extended (APP-x), ICESat, CryoSat-2, SMOS, NASA IceBridge aircraft flights, and the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS). The satellite products are based on three different retrieval methods: an energy budget approach, measurements of ice freeboard, and the relationship betwe...

Monitoring glacier changes is essential for estimating the water mass balance of the Tibetan Plateau. In this study, we exploit ICESat laser altimetry data in combination with the SRTM DEM and the GLIMS glacier mask to estimate trends in change in glacial thickness between 2003 and 2009 on the whole Tibetan Plateau. Considering acquisition conditions of ICESat measurements and terrain surface c...

Digital elevation models (DEMs) are the basic data of science and engineering technology research. SRTM ASTER GDEM currently widely used global DEMs, TanDEM-X DEM, released in 2016, has attracted users’ attention due to its unprecedented accuracy. These datasets often for local applications quality DEMs affects results applications. Many researchers have assessed compared on a scale. To provide...