ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-2-W13-1747-2019 ICE SHEET ELEVATION MAPPING AND CHANGE DETECTION WITH THE ICE, CLOUD AND LAND ELEVATION SATELLITE-2 Csatho B. M. 1 Schenk A. F. 1 Neumann T. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6926-937X 2 Department of Earth Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA 05 06 2019 XLII-2/W13 1747 1751 Copyright: © 2019 B. M. Csatho et al. 2019 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-2-W13/1747/2019/isprs-archives-XLII-2-W13-1747-2019.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-2-W13/1747/2019/isprs-archives-XLII-2-W13-1747-2019.pdf

On September 15, 2018, ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation satellite) was successfully launched to measure ice sheet and glacier elevation change, sea ice freeboard, and vegetation. This paper describes the computation of surface elevation change rates obtained with SERAC (Surface Elevation Reconstruction And Change detection) from ICESat-2 observations. After summarizing some relevant aspects of ICESat-2 and its sole instrument ATLAS (Advanced Topographic Laser Altimetry System) the paper focuses on how we calculate time series of elevation change rates from ICESat-2’s data product ATL03. Since real ICESat-2 data suitable for generating time series of several time epochs are not yet available, we used simulated data for this study. We will start generating time series from real ICESat-2 data after the conclusion of the ongoing calibration and validation phase and we expect to present real-world examples at the WG III/9 meeting in June, 2019 in Enschede, The Netherlands.