An overview of ICESat-2 bathymetric capabilities and discoveries

The Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), on-orbit for nearly 3 years, continues to provide global elevation measurements to the broad science community. One of the most transformative discoveries during early mission operations was the realization that ICESat-2 could provide bathymetry in addition to the planned surface-specific data products for land ice, sea ice, ocean and land/vegetation. This is an important capability for coastal science, maritime intelligence and shallow water benthic monitoring at the global scale. ICESat-2 elevations are also becoming a critical component of satellite-derived bathymetry where multispectral imagery uses the measurements to create broad spatial maps with absolute vertical bathymetric depths. This article will highlight some of the most salient bathymetric observations and quantitative analyses of this space-based photon counting lidar that includes sea floor elevation retrievals but also environmental characterization such as wave structure and turbidity and monitoring of benthic habitats.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Defense + Commercial Sensing

• Publication date

  2022-06-03

• Fields of study

  Geography, Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1117/12.2624913
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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