EO Atlas
About
Datasets/ATL06
d030·dataset

How thick the ice sheets are

ICESat-2 ATL06 Land Ice Elevation
NSIDC DAAC ATL06 cloud-native 40 m segments along-track 91-day repeat HDF5cloud-optimized HDF5 cryospheresea-level

The canonical NASA ice-sheet elevation product. Drives Greenland + Antarctica mass-balance assessments + sea-level-rise projections.

ICESat-2 ATL06 Land Ice Elevation

The canonical NASA ice-sheet elevation product. Drives Greenland + Antarctica mass-balance assessments + sea-level-rise projections.

Access

Gotchas

  • icepyx is the recommended Python wrapper
  • Strong beams (gt1l, gt2l, gt3l) preferred for ice; weak beams have lower SNR
  • Cloud-optimized HDF5 since 2024-25 — much faster
  • Other datasets: d031, d032

Sources

The access details, code, and sources below are kept in the original English for technical accuracy.

Quick access (cloud-direct)

atl06_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="ATL06",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream from NSIDC DAAC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

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