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isce_sat2

isce_sat2 (a play on the InSAR processing software ISCE2 and ICESat-2) is a project to explore the data fusion possibilities between the ICESat-2 space-based lidar, UAVSAR, and future NISAR based L-band InSAR for snow water storage measurements.

Collaborators

Research Motivations

  1. How can ICESat-2 improve our ability to use UAVSAR/NISAR?
  2. Can we combine these instruments to improve our ability to estimate snow water storage?
  3. Learn more about our respective instruments and get to work together!

What are UAVSAR and ICESat-2?

UAVSAR is a low frequency plane-based synthetic aperature radar. UAVSAR stands for "Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperature Radar". It captures imagery using a L-band radar. This low frequency means it can penetrate into and through clouds, vegetation, and snow.

ICESat-2 carries the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), a photon counting LiDAR instrument. The ATLAS laser operates at 532 nanometers, a bright green color, and is split into 3 main tracks roughly 3km apart each with a weak and strong beam. In this project we worked with the ATL03, ATL06, and ATL08 products. ATL03 gives the global geolocated photon cloud, ATL06 gives land ice elevation, and ATL08 gives land water vegetation elevation.

Aditional Resources

Sliderule example notebook: https://github.com/ICESat2-SlideRule/sliderule-python/blob/main/examples/api_widgets_demo.ipynb

UAVSAR InSAR Data Types: https://uavsar.jpl.nasa.gov/science/documents/rpi-format.html

Specific Questions

  1. Can we use ICESat-2 to constrain phase change in UAVSAR pairs?
  2. How well do ICESat-2 snow depths compare to UAVSAR?
  3. How often does ICESat-2 intersect with itself and UAVSAR image pairs?
  4. Is this kind of comparison scaleable?
  5. How does UAVSAR coherence compare with ICESat-2 confidence?

Contents

contributors

Each team member has it's own folder under contributors, where they can work on their contribution. Having a dedicated folder for each person helps to prevent conflicts when merging with the main branch.

data

Pickled data files

notebooks

Notebooks that are considered delivered results for the project should go in here.

scripts

Helper utilities that are shared with the team

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published