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Full catalog/ATL10
ATL10·v007·dataset

How high sea ice floats above water (ICESat-2, v6)

ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Sea Ice Freeboard V006
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. How high floating sea ice sticks up above the surrounding ocean water, calculated in roughly 10-kilometer stretches along the satellite's path.

How it's made. Derived from laser-ranging measurements by the ATLAS instrument aboard the ICESat-2 satellite, which times how long light takes to bounce back to gauge surface height.

How & where you'd use it. A key input for estimating how thick sea ice is, which in turn feeds climate research and tracking of polar ice over time.

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.