4B.14
A procedure development of incorporating and processing ICESat data into a GIS system
Burcu Cicek, Univ. of Texas, San Antonio, TX; and H. Xie and T. DeLiberty
The ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite) is the benchmark of NASA's EOS mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. Several tools have been developed to review and clip data into subsets, but none of the outputs from those tools can be directly incorporated into a GIS system. We develop a 3-steps procedure to process the GLAS/ICESat level 2 products into a dataset that can be directly integrated into a GIS system for geospatial and statistic analyses. These 3-steps consists of (1) converting the raw binary file into a text file using a provided IDL script from The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC); (2) a customized method (LABVIEW) to automatically subset and format the data, namely if longitude > 180º, then longitude takes longitude – 360º and latitude should be between -70º to -85º; and (3) the data was then converted to a GIS shape file for reprojecting to stereographic south polar projection. By incorporating ICESat data into a GIS system (i.e. ArcGIS), the GIS-provided powerful data visualization, spatial and statistical tools can then be easily used, other GIS layers and remotely sensed data such as the AMSR-E snow depth, can also be easily incorporated into the system for any comprehensive analysis, which will help to best extract scientific information from various datasets. .
Session 4B, GIS Applications
Tuesday, 16 January 2007, 1:30 PM-5:30 PM, 217A
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