The Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) laser altimetry mission from 2003 to 2008 provided an important dataset for elevation measurements. The quality of GLAS/ICESat (Geoscience Laser Altimeter System) data was investigated for Lake Leman in Switzerland and France by comparing laser data to hydrological gauge water levels. The correction of GLAS/ICESat waveform saturation successf...

6 [1] The primary goal of the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation 7 Satellite (ICESat) mission is ice sheet elevation change 8 detection. Confirmation that ICESat is achieving its stated 9 scientific requirement of detecting spatially-averaged 10 changes as small as 1.5 cm/year requires continual 11 assessment of ICESat-derived elevations throughout the 12 mission. We use a GPS-derived digital elevat...

With the conclusion of the science phase of the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) mission in late 2009, and the planned launch of ICESat-2 in late 2015, NASA has recently established the IceBridge program to provide continuity between missions. A major goal of IceBridge is to obtain a sea-ice thickness time series via airborne surveys over the Arctic and Southern Oceans. Typicall...

During this quarter we have concentrated on the analysis of crossover data in Antarctica from both GLAS laser 1 and laser 2. The results of these analyses are presented below. Thomas Herring gave a talk on ICESat to the faculty of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences on the day that Laser 2 was turned on. The talk has been added to the MIT ICESat web page (http://www-gpsg...

With a planned launch no later than September 2018, the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) will provide a global distribution of geodetic elevation measurements for both the terrain surface and relative canopy heights. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) instrument on-board ICESat-2 is a LiDAR system sensitive to the photon level. The photon-counting techno...

State of the Problem Lidar remote sensing provides measurements of horizontal and vertical vegetation structure of ecosystems which will be critical for estimating global carbon storage and assessing ecosystem response to climate change and natural and anthropogenic disturbances. However, no consistent approach currently exists to derive the lidar based vegetation structure information required...

[1] Exchange of carbon between forests and the atmosphere is a vital component of the global carbon cycle. Satellite laser altimetry has a unique capability for estimating forest canopy height, which has a direct and increasingly well understood relationship to aboveground carbon storage. While the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICE...

Snow on Antarctic sea ice plays a key role for sea ice physical processes and complicates retrieval of sea ice thickness using altimetry. Current methods of snow depth retrieval are based on satellite microwave radiometry, which perform best for dry, homogeneous snow packs on level sea ice. We introduce an alternative approach based on in-situ measurements of total (sea ice plus snow) freeboard...

Indonesian peatlands are one of the largest near-surface pools of terrestrial organic carbon. Persistent logging, drainage and recurrent fires lead to huge emission of carbon each year. Since tropical peatlands are highly inaccessible, few measurements on peat depth and forest biomass are available. We assessed the applicability of quality filtered ICESat/GLAS (a spaceborne LiDAR system) data t...

[1] The small footprint ( 70 m) and 172 m alongtrack spacing of the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) on the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) provides unprecedented horizontal resolution for a satellite altimeter. This enables ICESat to map many previously unresolved features on ice shelves, such as crevasses, rifts, grounding zones and ice fronts. We present examples of ...