Airborne laser ice surface height and slope (IceBridge)
What it measures. Smoothed measurements of how high the ice surface is, plus how steep (slope) and bumpy (roughness) it is, over Arctic and Antarctic sea ice and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
How it's made. Collected by a laser-mapping instrument (the Airborne Topographic Mapper) flown on research aircraft during NASA's Operation IceBridge campaigns, then resampled and smoothed.
How & where you'd use it. Supports studies of how ice thickness and surface shape change, helping bridge gaps between satellite missions and track ice loss.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2009-03-31 → 2019-11-20
- Measured byC-130 (ATM) · DC-8 (ATM) · G-V (ATM) · HU-25A (ATM) · HU-25C (ATM) · P-3B (ATM) · WP-3D ORION (ATM)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, 60, 180, 90
- FormatsASCII
- StatusCOMPLETE
What you can do with it
- Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
- Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
- Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description
This data set contains resampled and smoothed elevation measurements of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and Greenland, Antarctic Peninsula, and West Antarctic region land ice surface acquired using the NASA Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) instrumentation. The data were collected as part of Operation IceBridge funded aircraft survey campaigns.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="ILATM2",
version="2",
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_CPRDBrowsing 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
- IceBridge ATM L2 Icessn Elevation, Slope, and Roughness, Version 2 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION