Enhancements for the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) Data Products and Services

Abstract:

The principle objective of the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-1) mission was to measure ice sheet elevations and changes to elevation through time. Secondary objectives included measurement of cloud and aerosol height profiles, land elevation and vegetation cover, and sea ice thickness. The Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS), in operation from January 2003 through October 2009 was the sole instrument on ICESat-1. The data from this mission are archived and made available to the public at NASA’s Distributed Active Archive Center located at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC DAAC), University of Colorado in Boulder.

 Release 34 of ICESat-1 GLAS data completed in late 2014. These data were produced in the original binary format and also in HDF5. This release contains several important fixes to the altimetry data products which include a correction to the surface elevation, a dry tropospheric jitter correction, and adjustments to several confidence and characteristic flags. There are a variety of methods to obtain these data ranging from direct download from an online archive to using the Reverb Search and Order Tool which allows for spatial and temporal searches. Subsetting is also available for both the binary and HDF5 formats.