Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/NOS SCUBA ICESAT2 PDS
NOS SCUBA ICESAT2 PDS·dataset

Satellite-laser coastal water-depth mapping (NOAA/NGA SCuBA)

NOAA / NGA Satellite Computed Bathymetry Assessment-SCuBA
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. An effort to map shallow coastal seafloor depths using satellite laser measurements, testing how well a space-based laser can gauge water depth across different seafloor types, water clarity, and surface conditions.

How it's made. Built on NASA's ICESat-2 laser-altimeter (lidar) satellite, which NOAA and the NGA validated and then used to calibrate and improve other satellite-derived depth maps.

How & where you'd use it. Aims to improve nautical depth information for safe navigation, especially in coastal areas where traditional surveys are sparse or outdated.

What's measured

aws-pdsbathymetryagricultureweatherclimateenvironmentaldisaster responsetransportationoceans

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

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

One of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) missions is to ensure the safety of navigation on the seas by maintaining the most current information and the highest quality services for U.S. and global transport networks. To achieve this mission, we need accurate coastal bathymetry over diverse environmental conditions. The SCuBA program focused on providing critical information to improve existing bathymetry resources and techniques with two specific objectives. The first objective was to validate National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Ice, Cloud and land Elevation SATellite-2 (ICESat-2), an Earth observing, space-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR) capability, as a useful bathymetry tool for nearshore bathymetry information in differing environmental conditions. Upon validating the ICESat-2 bathymetry retrievals relative to sea floor type, water clarity, and water surface dynamics, the next objective is to use ICESat-2 as a calibration tool to improve existing Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB) coastal bathymetry products with poor coastal depth information but superior spatial coverage. Current resources that monitor coastal bathymetry can have large vertical depth errors (up to 50 percent) in the nearshore region; however, derived results from ICESat-2 shows promising results for improving the accuracy of the bathymetry information in the nearshore region. **Project Overview** One of NGA’s and NOAA’s primary missions is to provide safety of navigation information. However

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).