HR: 08:00h
AN: C31A-01 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: NASA's Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat): Advancing Our Understanding of Ice and the Earth System
AU: * Abdalati, W
EM: Waleed.Abdalati@nasa.gov
AF: NASA Headquarters, Office of Earth Science 300 E St. SW, Washington, DC 20546 United States
AB: As part of NASA's mission to "Understand and protect our home planet" the Earth Science Enterprise's cryospheric sciences program has as its primary focus understanding what changes are occurring in the mass of the Earth's ice cover, and the relationships between the Earth's dynamic ice and the rest of the Earth System. Recent observations using a comprehensive suite of both spaceborne and airborne instruments developed within NASA's Earth Science Enterprise and through our interagency and international partnerships have revealed the very complex and spatially variable behavior of the Earth's great ice sheets, with some very dynamic areas losing mass rapidly while others regions show positive mass balance. Recognizing that a tremendous amount of information about an ice sheet's behavior is manifest in its shape and how that shape changes with time, NASA's ICESat mission is designed to precisely measure ice elevations and elevation changes to determine the ice sheets' contributions to sea level and understand the mechanisms that govern those contributions. With a 94-degree inclination and pulsing at a rate of 40 times per second, ICESat provides measurements all over the world at 170-meter intervals along-track, with centimeter-scale accuracy over the ice and meter-scale accuracy on land. As such, detailed topographic measurements that were previously unachievable can be obtained the world over. While other remote sensing instrumentation provides critical spatial information, ICESat represents a groundbreaking mission that has as its focus measurements in the critical vertical dimension utilizing tremendous advances in laser ranging capabilities, orbit determination, and pointing accuracy. The ICESat mission will provide unprecedented insight into the behavior of ice, land cover, cloud characteristics, as well as some promising insights into the behavior of other geophysical systems.
DE: 1243 Space geodetic surveys
DE: 1299 General or miscellaneous
DE: 1640 Remote sensing
DE: 1827 Glaciology (1863)
DE: 1863 Snow and ice (1827)
SC: Cryosphere [C]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting