Speakers: Ron Kwok, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the ICESat-2 Team
This webinar is designed for the sea ice research community and others interested in information about satellite and airborne observations of sea ice. While this is an open event, attendees should be aware that the discussions will largely be of a technical nature.
This webinar will be presented by Ron Kwok, National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the ICESat-2 Team. Ron Kwok is a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena California. His research interests include the mass and energy balance of the Arctic and Southern Ocean ice cover and the role of the sea ice in global climate, with current focus on the analysis of thickness, small-scale sea ice kinematics, time varying gravity from various spaceborne and airborne instruments.
The presentation will focus on one of NASA’s science objectives for the ICESat-2 altimetry mission—to provide observations to quantify changes and to add to previous satellite and airborne records of freeboard, thickness, and sea surface height of the ice-covered Arctic and Southern Oceans (e.g., from ICESat, Operation IceBridge, and CryoSat-2, etc.). ATLAS, a multi-beam photon-counting lidar, the sole instrument on the ICESat-2 observatory, launched in September 2018, provides a rich altimetric dataset of multiple profiles of the ice and ocean surfaces. In this talk, the presenters will show the capabilities of the multi-beam instrument based on data acquired thus far over the Arctic and Antarctic ice covers. In particular, they will show the precision in the retrieved surface heights over relatively flat surface, the spatial resolution of the height estimates, the time-varying freeboard estimates and sea surface height anomalies over a seasonal cycle, and assessments of the retrievals when compared with airborne and field acquisitions.
Time for participant questions will follow the presentation. The webinar will be archived and available online after the event.
For questions, please contact Betsy Turner-Bogren, ARCUS (betsy [at] arcus.org).