• The NSIDC DAAC is retiring access to its legacy, on-premises data archive and transitioning to the NASA Earthdata Cloud as the primary data archive. View planned retirement dates here.

ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Land and Vegetation Height Quick Look, Version 6
Data set id:
ATL08QL
DOI: 10.5067/ATLAS/ATL08QL.006
There is a more recent version of these data.
Version Summary
Changes for Version 6 are as follows:

  • Added a quality check to reject segments for which the canopy photons fall more than 150 m below the reference DEM

  • Calculated the background noise rate and number of noise photons within a canopy segment and adjusted the canopy radiometric rate accordingly

  • For segments with a solar elevation angle > 20°, if the background noise rate is < 0.98 of the canopy rate, then reassign the canopy photons as noise photons

  • Incorporated the YAPC photon weights from the ATL03 data product into the ground-finding approach

  • Reduced the number of labeled photons required to report the canopy or terrain heights within each segment for the strong and weak beams, resulting in more ATL08 reported values

In this section
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Overview

ATL08QL is the quick look version of ATL08. Once final ATL08 files are available the corresponding ATL08QL files will be removed. ATL08 contains along-track heights above the WGS84 ellipsoid (ITRF2014 reference frame) for the ground and canopy surfaces. The canopy and ground surfaces are processed in fixed 100 m data segments, which typically contain more than 100 signal photons. The data were acquired by the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) instrument on board the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) observatory.
Parameter(s):
Canopy Height
TERRAIN ELEVATION
Platform(s):
ICESat-2
Sensor(s):
ATLAS
Data Format(s):
HDF5
Temporal Coverage:
  • 15 January 2023 to 17 June 2025
Temporal Resolution:
  • 91 day
Spatial Resolution:
  • Not Specified
Spatial Reference System(s):
  • WGS 84
    EPSG:4326
Spatial Coverage:
  • N:
    90
    S:
    -90
    E:
    180
    W:
    -180
Blue outlined yellow areas on the map below indicate the spatial coverage for this data set.

Data Access & Tools

This data set has been retired. There is a more recent version of these data.

Documentation

Help Articles

General Questions & FAQs

FAQs on ICESat-2 quick looks
Read this help article to learn about what ICESat-2 quick look data products are and how to find them.
Read More
When will the legacy, on-premises archive be retired?
The NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC) is migrating its primary data access from its legacy, on-premises archive to the NASA Earthdata Cloud.
Read More

How to Articles

NASA Earthdata Cloud Data Access Guide
The NASA Earthdata Cloud is the NASA cloud-based archive of Earth observations. It is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Learn how to find and access NSIDC DAAC data directly in the cloud.
Read More