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Full catalog/LVISF2
LVISF2·v1·dataset

Airborne laser maps of ground and tree height (LVIS)

LVIS Facility L2 Geolocated Surface Elevation and Canopy Height Product V001
cryosphere NASA NSIDC_CPRD Level 2 active ASCII
In plain English

What it measures. Provides precise ground elevations and the height of tree canopies, measured from aircraft with a laser scanner.

How it's made. Collected by NASA's airborne LVIS laser (lidar) and camera instrument suite and processed into geolocated surface and canopy heights (Level 2). The provided description is brief.

How & where you'd use it. Used to map terrain and forest structure, estimate how much vegetation (and carbon) forests hold, and study ice and land surfaces.

What's measured

CRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIER ELEVATION/ICE SHEET ELEVATIONCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › SEA ICE ELEVATIONLAND SURFACE › TOPOGRAPHY › TERRAIN ELEVATIONBIOSPHERE › VEGETATION › CANOPY CHARACTERISTICS › VEGETATION HEIGHT

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-11-07 → ongoing
  • Measured byB-200 (LVIS) · G-III (LVIS) · G-V (LVIS) · P-3B (LVIS)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-167, -35, 27, 88
  • FormatsASCII
  • 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

This data set contains Level-2 geolocated surface elevation and canopy height measurements collected by the NASA Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS) Facility, an imaging lidar and camera sensor suite.

Get the data

lvisf2_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="LVISF2",
    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.