Surface height and sea ice freeboard of the Arctic Ocean from ICESat-2: Characteristics and early results ...
We present the first winter season of surface height and sea ice freeboards of the Arctic Ocean from the new ICESat-2 (IS-2) mission. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) onboard has six photon-counting beams for surface profiling with a 10-kHz pulse rate (inter-pulse distance of...
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2019
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.48577/jpl.qzhy2v http://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/citation?persistentId=doi:10.48577/jpl.QZHY2V |
| Summary: | We present the first winter season of surface height and sea ice freeboards of the Arctic Ocean from the new ICESat-2 (IS-2) mission. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) onboard has six photon-counting beams for surface profiling with a 10-kHz pulse rate (inter-pulse distance of ~0.7m) and footprints of ~17m. Geolocated heights assigned to individual photons scattered from the surface allow significant flexibility in the construction of height distributions used in surface finding. For IS-2 sea ice products, a fixed 150-photon aggregate is used to control height precision and obtain better along-track resolution over high reflectance surfaces. Quasi-specular returns in openings as narrow as ~27m, crucial for freeboard calculations, are resolved. The fixed photon aggregate results in unique variable along-track resolutions and non-uniform sampling (27m to 200m for the strong beams) of the surface. In addition, the six profiling beams – three pairs separated by 3.3 km with a strong and weak ... |
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