Minimizing Intra-Campaign Biases in Airborne Laser Altimetry By Thorough Calibration of Lidar System Parameters

Abstract:

Present-day airborne lidar surveys of polar ice, NASA's Operation IceBridge foremost among them, cover large geographical areas. They are often compared with previous surveys over the same flight lines to yield mass balance estimates. Systematic biases in the lidar system, especially those which vary from campaign to campaign, can introduce significant error into these mass balance estimates and must be minimized before the data is released by the instrument team to the larger scientific community. NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) team designed a thorough and novel approach in order to minimize these biases, and here we describe two major aspects of this approach. First, we conduct regular ground vehicle-based surveys of lidar calibration targets, and overfly these targets on a near-daily basis during field campaigns. We discuss our technique for conducting these surveys, in particular the measures we take specifically to minimize systematic height biases in the surveys, since these can in turn bias entire campaigns of lidar data and the mass balance estimates based on them. Second, we calibrate our GPS antennas specifically for each instrument installation in a remote-sensing aircraft. We do this because we recognize that the metallic fuselage of the aircraft can alter the electromagnetic properties of the GPS antenna mounted to it, potentially displacing its phase center by several centimeters and biasing lidar results accordingly. We describe our technique for measuring the phase centers of a GPS antenna installed atop an aircraft, and show results which demonstrate that different installations can indeed alter the phase centers significantly.