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Streaming cloud-hosted ICESat-2 ATL15 (Gridded Antarctic/Arctic Land Ice Height) to calculate dh/dt trends


Authors

Key learning outcomes

  • Learn how to open, plot, and explore gridded raster data from the ICESat-2 ATL15 data product.

  • Use Xarray to import multi-dimensional data stored in “the cloud” and apply a function across a data cube.

  • Use gridded time series data to calculate per pixel height change (dh/dt) trends across the full duration of the ICESat-2 mission (2019 to latest release date).

What is ICESat-2?

ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2), part of NASA’s Earth Observing System, is a satellite mission for measuring ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography, vegetation characteristics, and clouds. It does so using an altimeter or an altitude meter, which is an instrument used to measure the altitude of an object above a fixed level (the datum we talked about earlier). This is typically achieved by measuring the time it takes for a lidar or radar pulse, released by a satellite-based altimeter, to travel to a surface, reflect, and return to be recorded by an onboard instrument. ICESat-2 uses three pairs of laser pulsers and the detector to count the reflected photons.

ICESat-2 laser configuration (from Smith and others, 2019):

ICESat-2 laser configuration

What is ATL14/15?

ATL15 is one of the various ICESat-2 data products. ATL15 provides various resolutions (1 km, 10 km, 20 km, and 40 km) of gridded (AKA raster) data of height change at 3-month intervals (Smith and others, 2022), allowing for estimation of dh/dt at each grid cell.

ATL14 is an accompnaying high-resolution (100 m) digital elevation model (DEM) that provides spatially continuous gridded data of ice sheet surface height at a specific datetime. ATL15 height changes are relative to the ATL14 DEM.

Learn more about the ICESat-2 ATL14/15 Gridded Antarctic and Arctic Land Ice Height Change data product dataset here.

Streaming cloud-hosted data from NASA Earthdata Cloud

We will be working with cloud-hosted data files. This guide explains how to find and access Earthdata cloud-hosted data. Here is a complete list of earthdata cloud-hosted data products currently available from NSIDC.

Streaming cloud-hosted NASA Earthdata requires a free account. Get one here.

<earthaccess.auth.Auth at 0x7ff27abe7990>
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[<File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_SV_0321_40km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_GL_0321_40km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CS_0321_01km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_SV_0321_10km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_GL_0321_20km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_SV_0321_20km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_RA_0321_20km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_RA_0321_01km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_IS_0321_40km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_IS_0321_01km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CN_0321_20km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CN_0321_40km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CN_0321_10km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_IS_0321_10km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CS_0321_10km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CS_0321_20km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_SV_0321_01km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_IS_0321_20km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_RA_0321_40km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_GL_0321_01km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CN_0321_01km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_CS_0321_40km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_RA_0321_10km_004_01.nc>, <File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_GL_0321_10km_004_01.nc>]
<File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_GL_0321_01km_004_01.nc>
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Define functions

Greenland Ice Sheet dh/dt

This code will take a few minutes to run.

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Antarctica Ice Sheet ATL15 pre-processing

ATL15 data covering Antarctica requires an additional step of preprocessing because the data are served separately in four quadrants (A1, A2, A3, and A4), which are the cartesian quadrantes in polar stereographic coordinates about the geographic south pole. So in order to make a continental-scale plot of ATL15, we first need to stitch these individual data files together.

(from ATL15 dataset user guide (Smith and others, 2024)): ICESat-2 ATL15 regions

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<File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_A2_0321_01km_004_01.nc>
<File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_A3_0321_01km_004_01.nc>
<File-like object HTTPFileSystem, https://n5eil01u.ecs.nsidc.org/DP8/ATLAS/ATL15.004/2019.01.01/ATL15_A4_0321_01km_004_01.nc>

Antarctic Ice Sheet dh/dt

The following code does continental-scale calculations of dh/dt and takes 20-30 minutes to run.

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References
  1. Smith, B., Fricker, H. A., Holschuh, N., Gardner, A. S., Adusumilli, S., Brunt, K. M., Csatho, B., Harbeck, K., Huth, A., Neumann, T., Nilsson, J., & Siegfried, M. R. (2019). Land ice height-retrieval algorithm for NASA’s ICESat-2 photon-counting laser altimeter. Remote Sensing of Environment, 233, 111352. 10.1016/j.rse.2019.111352
  2. Smith, B., Jelley, B. P., Dickinson, S., Sutterley, T., Neumann, T., & Harbeck, K. (2024). ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3B Gridded Antarctic and Greenland Height Change, Version 4. NASA National Snow. 10.5067/ATLAS/ATL15.004