OVERVIEW OF THE TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEM CARBON MONITORING SATELLITE LASER ALTIMETER

This paper presents a global-to-local method to improve forest height estimates by fusing InSAR and GEDI data. The large-scale ability was tested on open-access ALOS-1 data, where a two-fold solution is used to address temporal gap between GEDI and ALOS data. Produced products of 30 m gridded forest height mosaics for the northeastern U.S. and China show improved accuracy at 3–4 m/ha and 20 % enhancement over interpolated GEDI maps. The prototype is promising to fuse GEDI and future NISAR data.

In the data-rich era, data assimilation is widely used to integrate abundant observations into models to reduce uncertainty in ecological forecasting. However, applications of data assimilation are restricted by highly technical requirements. To alleviate this technical burden, we developed a model-independent data assimilation (MIDA) module which is friendly to ecologists with limited programming skills. MIDA also supports a flexible switch of different models or observations in DA analysis.