First forest canopy heights from NASA’s ICESat mission

Posted on June 29, 2019June 29, 2019 by Geoff Zeiss

First terrain surface and canopy heights from ICESat-2

Launched in September 2018, ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) has just begun making its first data available. The data map global terrain surface and forest canopies. The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) instrument on-board ICESat-2 utilizes photon counting technology for the altimetry observations. Photon counting technology is relatively new to the vegetation mapping community. Data from ICESat-2 will provide global terrain elevation and canopy height estimates as well as showing potential for estimation of forest biomass.

The ATL08 land and vegetation product for the ICESat-2 Mission, Amy Neuenschwander, Katherine Pitts Remote Sensing of Environment, 221, February 2019, Pages 247-259 doi/10.1016/j.rse.2018.11.005

First forest canopy heights from NASA’s ICESat mission

Launched in September 2018, ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) has just begun making its first data available. Data from ICESat-2 will provide global terrain elevation and canopy height estimates as well as showing potential for estimation of forest biomass.

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Reconstructing Earth’s temperature for the past 500 million years

The Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has charted swings in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past 500 million years to show ancient temperature extremes. To extend the record to 500 million years a new dating technique “clumped isotopes” that measures the abundance of two or more rare isotopes has been used.

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Plan to capture Antarctica ice core reaching back 1.5 million years

A new international drilling program in Antarctica is expected to capture data up to 1.5 million years ago when Earth’s glacial/deglacial cycles were about 41,000 years which corresponds to the Earth’s obliquity cycle as predicted by Malinkovitch. It may also shed light on why the climate switched to the 100,000 year cycle.

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From Our Files

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Simple rule accounts for onset of ice age deglaciations over the past three million years

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