Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
Volume 52, Issue 4, Pages 2109-2125Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2013.2258350
Keywords
Algorithms; altimetry; laser measurements; satellites
Categories
Funding
- ICESat-2 Project, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center [NNX10AR46G, NNX11AH43G S01]
- Air Force Research Lab [PO FA8650-05C-1817]
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NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-II (ICESat-2) mission is a decadal survey mission (2016 launch). The mission objectives are to measure land ice elevation, sea ice freeboard, and changes in these variables, as well as to collect measurements over vegetation to facilitate canopy height determination. Two innovative components will characterize the ICESat-2 lidar: 1) collection of elevation data by a multibeam system and 2) application of micropulse lidar (photon-counting) technology. A photon-counting altimeter yields clouds of discrete points, resulting from returns of individual photons, and hence new data analysis techniques are required for elevation determination and association of the returned points to reflectors of interest. The objective of this paper is to derive an algorithm that allows detection of ground under dense canopy and identification of ground and canopy levels in simulated ICESat-2 data, based on airborne observations with a Sigma Space micropulse lidar. The mathematical algorithm uses spatial statistical and discrete mathematical concepts, including radial basis functions, density measures, geometrical anisotropy, eigenvectors, and geostatistical classification parameters and hyperparameters. Validation shows that ground and canopy elevation, and hence canopy height, can be expected to be observable with high accuracy by ICESat-2 for all expected beam energies considered for instrument design (93.01%-99.57% correctly selected points for a beam with expected return of 0.93 mean signals per shot (msp), and 72.85%-98.68% for 0.48 msp). The algorithm derived here is generally applicable for elevation determination from photon-counting lidar altimeter data collected over forested areas, land ice, sea ice, and land surfaces, as well as for cloud detection.
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