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

In plain English

What it measures. How high sea ice floats above the surrounding water (its freeboard), calculated along the satellite's path in 10-km segments. This is a fast 'quick look' version.

How it's made. Computed from laser-altimeter measurements by the ATLAS instrument on NASA's ICESat-2 satellite, using the same methods as the final product but released sooner.

How & where you'd use it. Lets researchers get an early read on sea ice conditions and thickness; these quick-look files are replaced once the polished final versions are ready.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › FREEBOARD

Coverage & cadence

Time span2025-12-15 → 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

ATL10QL is the quick look version of ATL10 and is based on the same algorithms that generate the ATL10 final data products. Once final ATL10 files are available, the corresponding ATL10QL files are removed. 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

atl10ql_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="ATL10QL",
    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.

Official links

Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Sea Ice Freeboard Quick Look, Version 7 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
ATL07/ATL10 Known Issues (V7) VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
ATL10 Data Dictionary (V7) VIEW RELATED INFORMATION