Identifying Communities and Gaps in Engagement: Lessons Learned from NASA’s ICESat-2 Applications Program

Altimeter data from the first- and second-generation NASA Ice, Cloud and land Elevation satellite missions has the potential to transform a variety of key areas of societal decision making such as ocean navigation, surface water monitoring, and wildland fuels assessments. We reviewed the literature to identify applications of ICESat and ICESat-2 data, as well as gaps in the literature to identify where additional research may be needed. Boolean searches were conducted in the scholarly database ProQuest to identify bibliographic citations which were likely to indicate applications and user communities of data from the ICESat and ICESat-2 satellite lidar missions. In this presentation, we share the Applications Program outcomes and summarize the lessons learned based on the published literature and interviews with ICESat-2 early adopters. Because engagement is entirely volunteer beyond the Applications Team, ensuring broad and deep networks and connections to institutions and organizations that may use ICESat-2 data to improve decision making in a variety of contexts is essential for success. We highlight findings from our community questionnaire and interviews with Early Adopters to present the Applications Program as a novel pathway for building partnerships between satellite data users and mission scientists. The ICESat-2 Applications Program serves as an example of how the NASA Earth science community is supporting the coproduction of knowledge for new earth science observations to increase the effectiveness of their use in societally relevant decision processes and actions.