Evaluation of best-fit terrain elevation of ICESat-2 ATL08 using DGPS surveyed points

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>NASA’s new Earth-Observing satellite namely ICESat-2 estimates the elevation of ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, land surface, and canopy with the help of photon counting ATLAS sensor on-board. Higher-level data products like ATL08 uses an iterative filtering approach of the signal photons for capturing canopy height and terrain height. This article provides results from the evaluation of best-fit elevation on land from ICESat-2 ATL08 data product with DGPS surveyed points. 40 points were surveyed for elevation in the arid region with different topographies of varied surface cover. Mean bias error computed from the best-fit elevation from ICESat-2 ATL08 data product and corresponding DGPS surveyed points is near close to zero for the segments created from strong beams. The conformity between these two sets of elevation values is better than 12 cm (RMSE) if we use the segments from strong beam for the topographic variations ranging from flat to almost flat type.</jats:p>