1. “Operation IceBridge, CryoSat-2, ICESat”
Nathan Kurtz, NASA/GSFC
NSIDC DAAC UWG Meeting
August 9-10
Boulder, CO

2. Science research area
Science study area - Arctic and Antarctic sea ice
Types of data used: laser and radar altimetry (ICESat, OIB, CryoSat-2), visible and infrared imagery (OIB), reanalysis/model data
Overview of preprocessing/analysis steps: data ingestion, geolocation
Recommendations: need easy download script for new data over sea ice only

3. Science study/research area
Science question(s) being addressed: How is the thickness of the global sea ice cover changing?
Data are global extent
Time series: 2003-present for ICESat, OIB, and CryoSat-2
Is data latency/download time critical: Yes, move towards near real-time products

4. Types of data being used
Observational (satellite, airborne, site-based) data being used
Data types and formats needed/desired: netCDF, HDF5, text
Combining data with other sources or models?
Yes, sea ice freeboard data needs to be combined with snow depth data (from e.g. model, passive microwave) to get thickness
Large data volumes: Typically no, though OIB imagery is quite large

5. Data Workflow Question driven or exploratory: Exploratory
Pull data once and work on it locally: Yes
Continuous pull: Not currently doing, but would like to move towards this approach
Overview of preprocessing/analysis steps: retracking of radar data, separation of ice and water, geophysical correction application, combine freeboard and snow depth data
Challenges/friction points?
Data formats: data are typically in multiple formats
Computational limitations: work speed limited by number of processors
Subsetting/Regridding/reprojection: needed for combining data, especially reanalysis data

6. Recommendations Improvements to DAAC tools/services
Shared tools and scripts
Need to alert users to new data sets that may be of interest to their subject area
Push data/computing/tools into the cloud: could be effective if code is parallelized and there are free processors available