National Snow & Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center

nasa-nsidcdaac-gla09

GLAS/ICESat L2 Global Cloud Heights for Multi-layer Clouds

The Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) instrument on the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) provides global measurements of polar ice sheet elevation to discern changes in ice volume (mass balance) over time. Secondary objectives of GLAS are to measure sea ice roughness and thickness, cloud and atmospheric properties, land topography, vegetation canopy heights, ocean surface topography, and surface reflectivity. GLAS has a 1064 nm laser channel for surface altimetry and dense cloud heights, and a 532 nm lidar channel for the vertical distribution of clouds and aerosols. Level-2 cloud heights for multi-layer clouds (GLA09) contain cloud layer top and bottom height data at sampling rates of 4 sec, 1 sec, 5 Hz, and 40 Hz. Each data granule has an associated browse product that users can quickly view to determine the general quality of the data in the granule. Browse products consist of image plots of key parameters and statistics. Data are in scaled integer binary format, big-endian (Unix) byte order, and are available via FTP.

http://nsidc.org/data/GLA09

Identified by : GLA09

This dataset was released on August 11, 2011.

The time range for this dataset is February 20, 2003 to October 11, 2009.

The spatial range for this dataset is -86° to 86° latitude, and -180° to 180° longitude. map (center)

This dataset uses data from an instance of the geoscience-laser-altimeter-system instrument on the ice-cloud-and-land-elevation-satellite platform.
DOI : 10.5067/ICESAT/GLAS/DATA222
Also known as :

• dataset oai:nsidc/GLA09 (nsidc lexicon)