Abstract
In 2018, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is scheduled to launch the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), with a new six-beam, green-wavelength, photon-counting lidar system, Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS). The primary objectives of the ICESat-2 mission are to measure ice-sheet elevations, sea-ice thickness, and global biomass. However, if bathymetry can be reliably retrieved from ATLAS data, this could assist in addressing a key data need in many coastal and inland water body areas, including areas that are poorly-mapped and/or difficult to access. Additionally, ATLAS-derived bathymetry could be used to constrain bathymetry derived from complementary data, such as passive, multispectral imagery and synthetic aperture radar (SAR). As an important first step in evaluating the ability to map bathymetry from ATLAS, this study involves a detailed assessment of bathymetry from the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL), NASA’s airborne ICESat-2 simulator, flown on the Earth Resources 2 (ER-2) high-altitude aircraft. An interactive, web interface, MABEL Viewer, was developed and used to identify bottom returns in Keweenaw Bay, Lake Superior. After applying corrections for refraction and channel-specific elevation biases, MABEL bathymetry was compared against National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data acquired two years earlier. The results indicate that MABEL reliably detected bathymetry in depths of up to 8 m, with a root mean square (RMS) difference of 0.7 m, with respect to the reference data. Additionally, a version of the lidar equation was developed for predicting bottom-return signal levels in MABEL and tested using the Keweenaw Bay data. Future work will entail extending these results to ATLAS, as the technical specifications of the sensor become available.
Highlights
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s upcoming Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission, with a 91-day repeat period and near-polar orbit [1], provides a unique opportunity to assess ice sheet elevation change
The results indicate that Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL) reliably detected bathymetry in depths of up to 8 m, with a root mean square (RMS) difference of 0.7 m, with respect to the reference data
If it can be demonstrated that reliable bathymetry estimation from Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) is, possible, this could greatly benefit studies of coastal and inland water bodies, which are often hindered by a dearth of shallow-water bathymetry [3]
Summary
NASA’s upcoming Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission, with a 91-day repeat period and near-polar orbit [1], provides a unique opportunity to assess ice sheet elevation change. The primary objectives of ICESat-2 will be to measure ice-sheet elevations, sea-ice thickness, and global biomass [1], the ATLAS design specifications suggest the feasibility of bathymetry retrieval from. The fact that ATLAS is an active remote sensing system makes it of particular interest for bathymetric mapping, since it may be possible to synergistically fuse. 2016, 8, 772 water depth estimates from ATLAS with bathymetry retrieved from a variety of sources, including passive multispectral satellite imagery [4,5,6,7], such as from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data [8,9,10,11]. The bathymetric mapping capability would represent an important advancement over ICESat-2’s predecessor, the original ICESat, which carried the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS). GLAS used a 1064-nm laser, incapable of penetrating the water column to provide bathymetry, for elevation mapping
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