Abstract
Abstract. We present the results of an assessment of ice surface elevation measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) along the CHINARE (CHINese Antarctic Research Expedition) route near the Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica. The validation campaign was designed and implemented in cooperation with the 36th CHINARE Antarctic expedition from December 2019 to February 2020. The assessment of the ICESat-2 geolocated photon product (ATL03) and land ice elevation product (ATL06) was performed based on coordinated multi-sensor observations using two roof-mounted kinematic global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, two line arrays of corner cube retroreflectors (CCRs), two sets of retroreflective target sheets (RTSs), and two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with cameras. This systematic validation of the ICESat-2 data covered a variety of Antarctic ice surface conditions along the 520 km traverse from the coastal Zhongshan Station to the inland Taishan Station. This comprehensive investigation is complementary to the 750 km traverse validation of flat inland Antarctica containing a 300 km latitude traverse of 88∘ S by the mission team (Brunt et al., 2021). Overall, the validation results show that the elevation of the ATL06 ice surface points is accurate to 1.5 cm with a precision of 9.1 cm along the 520 km CHINARE route. The elevation of the ATL03 photons has an offset of 2.1 cm from a GNSS-surveyed CCR and is accurate to 2.5 cm with a precision of 2.7 cm as estimated by using RTSs. The validation results demonstrate that the estimated ICESat-2 elevations are accurate to 1.5–2.5 cm in this East Antarctic region, which shows the potential of the data products for eliminating mission biases by overcoming the uncertainties in the estimation of mass balance in East Antarctica. It should be emphasized that the results based on the CCR and RTS techniques can be improved by further aggregation of observation opportunities for a more robust assessment. The developed validation methodology and sensor system can be applied for continuous assessment of ICESat-2 data, especially for calibration against potential degradation of the elevation measurements during the later operation period.
Highlights
The new photon-counting laser altimetry satellite, Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), was successfully launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on 15 September 2018 (National Research Council, 2007; Markus et al, 2017; Neumann et al, 2019)
For the positions of the roof-mounted global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers along the inbound and outbound traverses, a threshold of the precision values given by the GNSS post-processed kinematic (PPK) positioning software system was used to filter out traverse points with large errors originating from rough terrain features and other noises, i.e., 3σ for the undulated topography near the coast (0–67 km) and 2σ for the relatively flat inland topography (67–520 km)
We validated the elevations of the ICESat-2 ATL06 ice surface points and ATL03 photons using the GNSS-surveyed elevations that are summarized according to six ICESat-2 tracks separately (Table 2)
Summary
The new photon-counting laser altimetry satellite, Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), was successfully launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on 15 September 2018 (National Research Council, 2007; Markus et al, 2017; Neumann et al, 2019). It is a follow-up to the previous ICESat laser altimetry mission, which is based on the full waveform range (Zwally et al, 2002; Schutz et al, 2008). We use Release 003 of the ICESat-2 geolocated photon elevation (ATL03) and land ice surface elevation (ATL06) products provided by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) (NSIDC, 2021; Neumann et al, 2019; Smith et al, 2019)
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