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Full catalog/ATL10
ATL10·v007·dataset

How high sea ice floats above the water (ICESat-2)

ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Sea Ice Freeboard V005
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. How high sea ice sits above the surrounding water (its freeboard), measured along the satellite's path in short stretches of the ocean.

How it's made. Calculated from laser-altimeter measurements taken by the ATLAS instrument on the ICESat-2 satellite, which precisely measures surface heights.

How & where you'd use it. A key step toward estimating sea ice thickness, which matters for tracking polar ice loss, climate change, and Arctic and Antarctic shipping conditions.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › FREEBOARD

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-10-14 → ongoing
  • Measured byICESat-2 (ATLAS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -88, 180, 88
  • FormatsHDF5
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Measure sea ice, snow cover and glaciers
  • Watch ice-sheet elevation change
  • Track freeze/thaw and permafrost
Official description

ATL10 contains along-track sea ice freeboard calculated for 10 km swath segments. The data were acquired by the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) instrument on board the ICESat-2 observatory.

Get the data

atl10_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="ATL10",
    version="007",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.