Bedrock depth and ice thickness from flying radar
What it measures. Measurements of glacier surface height, the elevation of the bedrock beneath the ice, and the resulting ice thickness, for glaciers in Alaska and northwestern Canada.
How it's made. Built from NASA's airborne IceBridge surveys: laser scanning gave the surface height while a radar that sees through ice gave the bed beneath, combined to compute thickness.
How & where you'd use it. Helps scientists study glacier volume and change, and supports modeling of ice loss and sea-level contributions.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2016-05-28 → 2021-05-13
- Measured byDHC-3 (RADAR ECHO SOUNDERS)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-157, 56, -129, 63
- 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 glacier surface elevation, bed elevation, and ice thickness measurements for Alaska and Northwestern Canada. Glacier surface elevation is derived from IceBridge UAF Lidar Scanner L1B Geolocated Surface Elevation Triplets (ILAKS1B). Radar bed returns are taken from IceBridge ARES L1B Geolocated Radar Echo Strength Profiles (IRARES1B).
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="IRARES2",
version="1",
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
- Search data by spatial and/or temporal ranges or file name. Choose from various download options, including a Python script. GET DATA
- Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. 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
- IRARES2: IceBridge ARES L2 Bed Elevation and Ice Thickness, Version 1 VIEW RELATED INFORMATION