C21A-0299:
Surface Elevation Measurements of Greenland and Antarctica Using NASA’s Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS)
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Michelle A Hofton1, James Bryan Blair2, David Rabine2, Matthew Beckley3, Colleen Brooks4, Helen Cornejo3 and Shane Wake2, (1)Univ Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Greenbelt, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)Sigma Space Corporation, Lanham, MD, United States
Abstract:
Since 2007, NASA’s Land Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS) has been used to collect wide-swath, waveform-based laser altimetry (lidar) measurements of large areas of Greenland and Antarctica from medium-high altitude airborne platforms. To date, ~350,000 km2 of data have been collected, processed and released via NSIDC under the auspices of NASA’s Operation Icebridge. In November 2013, the LVIS was paired with the LVIS-GH sensor (an updated version of the instrument developed for high-altitude operations in the Global Hawk UAV) and used to overfly Spring 2013 Icebridge or Cryosat-2 tracks in Greenland and the Arctic, providing data for seasonal change assessments and validation of Cryosat-2. The precise and accurate, large-area coverage capabilities provided by the LVIS systems are important to supporting and enhancing future space-based lidar missions such as ICESat-2 and GEDI. To maximize such support as well as provide targeted data sets for end users in the cryosphere and other communities, the LVIS Facility capability is currently under development with goals of providing up to 5 times more data than present with 2 month turnaround at much reduced cost to the end user. A summary of the Facility as well as airborne LVIS data collected to date and comparisons utilizing data will be presented.
