Greenland April 2022

In April 2022, NASA's LVIS Facility was used to collect data over sections of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding sea ice, supporting University of Kansas/CreSIS radar flights or future sensor design studies. The LVIS-F lidar sensor was used to collect surface elevation and structure information at low (1500’) or medium (23,000’) flight altitudes in the NASA P-3B, operating with 2 LVIS camera sensors and the KU/CReSIS radar sensor. Because of the different flight altitudes, collection parameters of the LVIS lidar and cameras varied (see mission information tables below for further details). Science targets included land and sea ice (from low flight altitudes), Humboldt Glacier and coastal and interior ice surfaces in western Greenland centered on recent ICESat-2 tracks (from medium flight altitudes).


Flight trajectories are available on this page.


Use the python code posted here to view the data products from this mission.

LVIS Mission Information

LVIS Lidar
Instrument: LVIS-F
Flight Platform: NASA P-3 Orion
Nominal Flight Altitude: 1,600'
(low altitude)		 23,000'
(medium altitude)
Nominal LVIS Swath Width: 80 m (150 mrad) 1.4 km (200 mrad)
Nominal Footprint Diameter: 1 m 14 m
LVIS Cameras
Camera Model: PhaseOne iXM-RS150F Canon EOS 5D Mk II
Lens Models: Rodenstock 180 mm Carl Zeiss Distagon
T* 28mm f/2 ZE
Image Resolution: 150 Megapixels
14,204px x 10,652px		 21 Megapixels
5,616 px x 3,744 px
Nominal Resolution: 2.1 km x 1.4 km (15 cm/px) 600 m x 400 m (10 cm/px)
Nominal Overlap: 67% 67%
Data Product: LVIS_CAM150MP LVIS_CAM020MP

Resources

Airports

  • KWAL - Wallops Flight Facility (Wallops Island, VA, USA)
  • BGTL - Thule Air Base (Pituffik, Greenland)

Data Products

LVIS Data Products Format Download Location
Flight TrajectoriesKMZThis page
Coverage MapsKMZThis page
LVIS L1A Camera ImageryJPG*NSIDC1, NASA EarthData
LVIS Facility L1B Geolocated WaveformsHDF, LDS 2.0.3NSIDC1, NASA EarthData
LVIS Facility L2 Elevation and Height ProductsASCII TXT, LDS 2.0.3NSIDC1, NASA EarthData

1 At NSIDC, search for date ranges 01 Apr 2022 through 30 Apr 2022



View MJD Date Region / Remarks GPS Flight Trajectory Preliminary LVIS Coverage* (Key) L2 Gridded KMZs† Photo KMZs†
CAM020MP
59681 12 April 2022 Sensor calibration flight, Atlantic Ocean [kmz] [kmz] [kmz]
59687 18 April 2022 Wallops Flight Facility to Thule Air Base [kmz] [kmz] [kmz]
59688 19 April 2022 Greenland Ice Sheet (Low altitude) [kmz] [kmz] [ZG] [kmz]
59690 21 April 2022 Humboldt Glacier [kmz] [kmz] [kmz]
59691 22 April 2022 Sea Ice, Ellesmere Island, Canada (Low altitude) [kmz] [kmz] [ZG] [kmz]
59694 25 April 2022 Interior and coastal ice, western Greenland [kmz] [kmz] [kmz]
59696 27 April 2022 Transit from Thule Air Base to Dover Air Force Base [kmz] [kmz] [kmz]
April 2022 All Flights [kmz]

*Preliminary LVIS Coverage locations are generated shortly after a flight and based on quicklook product information and are intended for general guidance only.
Key: Red=0%, Pink=1-10%, Orange=10-20%, Yellow=20-50%, Green=50-100%
†Warning: Gridded and Photo KMZ files are large and may take some time to load in Google Earth