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Tutorial

Comparing SWOT HR Elevation to ICESat-2

Authors
Affiliations
Colorado School of Mines
University of Maryland
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Colorado School of Mines

Overview

This is Part 2 of the SWOT data series. In Part 1: Visualizing SWOT Coverage over Antarctica, we plotted SWOT Low Rate (LR) and High Rate (HR) coverage over Antarctica and identified Bach Ice Shelf (Antarctic Peninsula) as a location with SWOT HR and LR coverage. In this tutorial, we compare SWOT HR raster elevations to NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) ATL06 land ice elevations over Bach Ice Shelf, verifying correct application of geophysical corrections.

Compare SWOT and ICESat-2 elevations on Bach Ice Shelf

We can see that there is HR coverage over Bach Ice Shelf so we will compare SWOT heights there to ICESat-2.

ICESat-2 is a photon-counting green laser altimeter. We can make this comparison because when measuring snow and ice surface heights, both SWOT (Ka band radar) and ICESat-2 (photon counting green laser) are considered surface sensing instruments. They penetrate to nearly equivalent depths into snow and ice, though Ka band radar likely penetrates millimeters to a few centimeters deeper into dry snow than ICESat-2 does. They are likely more indistinguishable for wet snow. More information about ICEsat-2 data products, mission, and tutorials is available in the ICESat-2 Cookbook.

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

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

We will use what we learned in the SWOT HR data access tutorial to compare the SWOT_L2_HR_Raster_100m product to ICESat-2’s Land Ice Height, Version 7 (ATL06) over a rift on Bach Ice Shelf.

To demonstrate different earthaccess search methods, we search for a specific granule of SWOT data found using Earthdata search and we search for all ICESAT-2 tracks in a specified bounding box and manually pick one ICESat-2 track that intersects the SWOT swath at our region of interest.

Imports, paths, and constants to get started

Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.
Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.
Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.
Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.
WARNING:rasterio._env:CPLE_AppDefined in The definition of geographic CRS EPSG:4326 got from GeoTIFF keys is not the same as the one from the EPSG registry, which may cause issues during reprojection operations. Set GTIFF_SRS_SOURCE configuration option to EPSG to use official parameters (overriding the ones from GeoTIFF keys), or to GEOKEYS to use custom values from GeoTIFF keys and drop the EPSG code.
/tmp/ipykernel_136/628993211.py:30: DeprecationWarning: Setting the shape on a NumPy array has been deprecated in NumPy 2.5.
As an alternative, you can create a new view using np.reshape (with copy=False if needed).
  moa_dat = moa.read(1)
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3 files found in time window in RIFT_BBOX
18 beams loaded

Preview and choose ATL06 tracks to compare with SWOT

We’ll plot the atl06 candidates on top of the SWOT swath and the MOA background map.

Use the is2_start/is2_end indices to step through candidates until you find a track that best crosses your area of interest (e.g., the crevasse field). The cell prints the granule filename and beam for each plotted candidate so you can note the one you want to use in the next step.

Previewing ATL06 candidates [0:18] out of total 18
gt1l  ATL06_20250515130244_09102710_007_01.h5
gt1r  ATL06_20250515130244_09102710_007_01.h5
gt2l  ATL06_20250515130244_09102710_007_01.h5
gt2r  ATL06_20250515130244_09102710_007_01.h5
gt3l  ATL06_20250515130244_09102710_007_01.h5
gt3r  ATL06_20250515130244_09102710_007_01.h5
gt1l  ATL06_20250520014201_09792712_007_01.h5
gt1r  ATL06_20250520014201_09792712_007_01.h5
gt2l  ATL06_20250520014201_09792712_007_01.h5
gt2r  ATL06_20250520014201_09792712_007_01.h5
gt3l  ATL06_20250520014201_09792712_007_01.h5
gt3r  ATL06_20250520014201_09792712_007_01.h5
gt1l  ATL06_20250524013336_10402712_007_01.h5
gt1r  ATL06_20250524013336_10402712_007_01.h5
gt2l  ATL06_20250524013336_10402712_007_01.h5
gt2r  ATL06_20250524013336_10402712_007_01.h5
gt3l  ATL06_20250524013336_10402712_007_01.h5
gt3r  ATL06_20250524013336_10402712_007_01.h5
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Apply comparable geophysics & interpolate SWOT along-track

We bring heights to a consistent reference, then interpolate the SWOT corrected elevations to the advected ICESat-2 points

AVISO username:  derekp@umd.edu
AVISO password:  ········
https://tds-odatis.aviso.altimetry.fr/thredds/fileServer/dataset-auxiliary-dynamic-atmospheric-correction/2025/dac_dif_27536_18.nc
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. Erofeeva, S., Greene, C. A., Howard, S. L., Padman, L., & Sutterley, T. (2024). CATS2008_v2023: Circum-Antarctic Tidal Simulation 2008, version 2023. U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) Data Center. 10.15784/601772
  3. LEGOS/CNRS/CLS. (1992). Dynamic Atmospheric Correction. CNES. 10.24400/527896/A01-2022.001