NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) was launched in September 2018 to measure the heights of all surfaces across the globe, including land ice, sea ice, oceans, water, and vegetation. ICESat-2 carries a photon-counting laser altimeter to measure these surfaces, providing measurements every 70 centimeters along the platform’s ground path at a rate of 10,000 laser pulses per second. 

In this webinar, we will provide an overview of the reference ICESat-2 sea ice data products. These include the along-track sea ice height and freeboard products (ATL07 and ATL10), as well as the derived gridded products ATL20 and ATL21. We will demonstrate earthaccess, a Python package to search for and access NASA data, including ICESat-2 datasets, both in the cloud and from your local machine. Lastly, we will present specific data use cases, including the derivation of sea ice thickness and applications in sea ice and climate modeling.