| Summary: | The prime objective of NASA's Arctic Ice Mapping project is to provide accurate ice sheet elevation data for the purpose of change detection. The airborne laser altimetry system, ATM, developed by NASA, was successfully used in several missions in Greenland. This report provides some background information about the data acquisition and processing of laser altimetry, with an emphasis on the ATM system. Further it describes the tests that have been carried out to derive digital elevation models and contour maps, and to extract ice features from the raw elevation data. A simple thinning scheme is applied to reduce the redundancy. Digital elevation models and contour maps are derived either from the original or from the thinned data. Six parallel strips were bridged together in different areas and the resulting elevation models were used to map ice sheet features, such as sastrugi, undulations and lakes.
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