Validation of ICESat-2 Surface Water Level Product ATL13 with Near Real Time Gauge Data

The NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) mission uses laser altimetry measurements to determine the elevations at point levels of Earth. ICESat-2, which is a successor to the ICESat-1 satellite mission is a continuation of this series and carries a sensor namely Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS). The key advancement of ICESat-2 is that it generates individual laser foot prints of nearly 14 m (in diameter) on the Earth’s surface, with each footprint separated by only 70 cm, a much higher resolution and sampling than the earlier mission. ATLAS works under the concept of multi-beam approach containing three pairs of strong and weak beams that produce data products containing global geolocated photon data and height data from land-ice, sea-ice, land/terrain, canopy, ocean surface, and inland water-bodies. From the Level 2 master product called ATL03 numerous sub-data product are generated and are made available to the public through the National Snow and Ice Data Center. One of the products namely ATL13 is a specialized geophysical data product that gives along-track and near-shore water surface height distribution within the water masks. In this article, results after validating ATL13 data product with 46 observations made with near real-time gauged data for 15 reservoirs/water bodies have been presented. The maximum uncertainty observed for this data product is at centimeter-level. A significant observation made from this study is that the heights of surface water level computed from strong beams (gt1r, gt2r, and gt3r) and weak beams (gt1l, gt2l, and gt3l) are occasionally having a variation of 5 to 10 centimeters relatively.