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Full catalog/ATL19
ATL19·v004·dataset

Monthly sea-surface height bumps and dips (ICESat-2)

ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3B Monthly Gridded Dynamic Ocean Topography V004
ocean NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 3 active HDF5
In plain English

What it measures. Monthly maps of the gentle bumps and dips in the sea surface caused by ocean currents and circulation, which can also be combined to get overall sea surface height.

How it's made. Built by gridding the along-track ocean height measurements from the ATLAS laser instrument on ICESat-2 into monthly averages over mid-latitude and polar regions.

How & where you'd use it. Used by oceanographers to study ocean circulation and sea surface patterns, with uncertainty estimates included to gauge how reliable each value is.

What's measured

OCEANS › SEA SURFACE TOPOGRAPHY › SEA SURFACE HEIGHT

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-10-13 → ongoing
  • Measured byICESat-2 (ATLAS)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-180, -88, 180, 88
  • FormatsHDF5
  • StatusACTIVE

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

ATL19 contains monthly gridded dynamic ocean topography (DOT) over midlatitude, north-polar, and south-polar grids derived from the along-track ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Ocean Surface Height product (ATL12). Monthly gridded sea surface height (SSH) can be calculated by adding the monthly gridded DOT and the weighted average geoid height also provided. Both single beam and all-beam gridded averages are available: single beam averages are useful for identifying potential biases among the beams, and the all-beam averages are useful in physical oceanography. Simple averages, degree-of-freedom uncertainty averages, and averages interpolated to the center of grid cells are included, as well as uncertainty estimates.

Get the data

atl19_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="ATL19",
    version="004",
    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.