How tall forest canopies are (ICESat-2) — IS2CHM

In plain English

What it measures. A map of how tall forest canopies are across the continental United States, giving the height of the trees.

How it's made. Created with a statistical model that combines tree-height measurements from NASA's ICESat-2 laser satellite with imagery and data from Landsat, LANDFIRE, and NASADEM.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for estimating forest biomass and carbon storage, mapping habitat, and supporting forestry and ecology research.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICS › VEGETATION HEIGHT

Coverage & cadence

Time span2019-01-01 → 2021-12-31
Measured byICESat-2 (ATLAS)
Processing levelLevel 4
Spatial extent-124.85, 24.4, -66.89, 49.37
FormatsCOG
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Map vegetation, forests and biomass
Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
Support habitat and biodiversity studies

Official description

This data set provides a regression-based canopy height model of the contiguous United States (CONUS) using data from ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Land and Vegetation Height (ATL08), as well as data from Landsat, LANDFIRE, and NASADEM.

Get the data

is2chm_access.py

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="IS2CHM",
    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_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

What's measured

Coverage & cadence

What you can do with it

Get the data

Official links