National Aeronautics and Space Administration

In September 2013, the NASA LVIS was deployed to Greenland for NASA's Operation IceBridge Summer Campaign. 9 flights were flown over sea ice and the icesheet, repeating flight lines covered by the Spring Campaign using the P3. Two LVIS instruments were mounted in the airplane, side by side, providing almost a 2x widened swath of data: Both sensors collected data within a 200mrad swath with a 50mrad overlap zone at nadir. Data from both sensors are available in Level1B and Level2 formats. The Level1b data files contain the geolocated laser waveform data for each laser footprint. The Level2 data files contain elevations of reflecting surfaces, derived from the Level1b data.

Level 2 files are much smaller and more manageable. For those users not familiar with waveform lidar data, we recommend that you start with the Level2 files before moving to the Level1b files (e.g., for context or to apply different algorithms).

The Level1B data are in HDF5 and the Level2 data are in ascii.

Data Products

*Image position and attitude embedded in exif data.

¹ At NSIDC, search for date ranges 01 Oct 2013 through 30 Nov 2013

Known Data Set Issues

The lower energy sections of the swaths were removed from the final data sets on some days. This was due to the poor quality installed in the nadir port in the aircraft which caused lensing and burning within the plexiglass. The window was rotated mid-deployment to minimize the affected area.

Localized lower energy sections of the swath were not stable and removed from final data sets where possible. This was caused by the airplane leaking fluid on some sections of some days of flights.