Assessment of ICESat-2’s Horizontal Accuracy Using Precisely Surveyed Terrains in McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica

Abstract

This article presents an assessment of the horizontal accuracy and precision of the laser altimetry observations collected by NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission. We selected the terrain-matching method to determine the position of laser altimeter profiles within a precisely known surface, represented by a digital elevation model (DEM). We took this classical approach a step further, approximated the DEM by planar surfaces, and calculated the optimal position of the laser profile by minimizing the square sum of the elevation differences between reference DEMs and ICESat-2 profiles. We found the highly accurate DEMs of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (DV), Antarctica, ideal for this research because of their stable landscape and rugged topography. We computed the 3-D shift parameters of 379 different laser altimeter profiles along two reference ground tracks collected within the first two years of the mission. Analyzing these results revealed a total geolocation error (mean +1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sigma $ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) of 4.93 m for version 3 and 4.66 m for version 4 data. These numbers are the averages of the six beams, expressed as mean +1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sigma $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and lie well within the mission requirement of 6.5 m.