ACCURACY AND RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF GLAS MEASUREMENTS OVER ISRAEL

Abstract. Availability of spaceborne laser data on a global scale motivates evaluation of their quality as a means to improve large scale terrain models or to identify changes over time. One prominent spaceborne system is the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) mounted on board the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) whose objectives were to track elevation changes of the Greenland and Antarctica's glaciers, but topographic information on other regions has been acquired as well. As the ICESat mission is the first to offer high-standard spaceborne laser derived topographic information, this paper evaluates its data quality. To that end, a large set of laser returns over Israel has been utilized and evaluated against a wide spectrum of data as a reference.