Thursday 25 August 2005

GP3 - Plenary Session
0830-0930 hours

325
NASA's Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite: exploring the Earth's Polar
regions using satellite laser altimetry
Abdalati, Waleed¹
1 NASA, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Author email: waleed@icesat2.gsfc.nasa.gov
NASA's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), launched in January, 2003, has been measuring surface elevations of ice and land, vertical distributions of clouds and aerosols, vegetation-canopy heights, and other features with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity. The primary purpose of ICESat has been to acquire time-series of ice-sheet elevation changes for determination of the present-day mass balance of the ice sheets, study of associations between observed ice changes and polar climate, and improve estimates of the present and future contributions to global sea level rise. Toward that end, the precise ranging capability and orbital knowledge has enabled retrieval of detailed ice sheet elevation characteristics not only at the relatively smooth and flat interior, but also at the rougher and more steeply sloped margins. This same capability has also enabled the utilization of ICESat data to estimate sea ice thickness in polar regions from estimates of ice freeboard height above the ocean. Moreover, with satellite coverage extending to 86 degrees latitude (optimized for ice sheet coverage), ICESat continues to provide detailed information about the surface heights of the oceans and the geoid at higher latitudes than any of its altimetry predecessors. ICESat represents a fundamentally new measurement capability that spans many science disciplines. It is NASA's first satellite mission designed specifically for cryospheric applications, and continues to reveal important new information about this dynamic element of the Earth System. An overview of the ICESat mission and its current status will be presented, and recent results from the ICESat mission and their application to polar terrestrial and marine processes will be discussed.

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