Airborne LVIS LiDAR measurements of surface topography and structure for ABoVE

Michelle Hofton, University of Maryland, mhofton@umd.edu (Presenter)
Bryan Blair, NASA GSFC, james.b.blair@nasa.gov
Dave Rabine, GSFC, david.l.rabine@nasa.gov
Helen Cornejo, NASA GSFC / SGT, helen.g.cornejo@nasa.gov
Sarah Story, NASA GSFC / SGT, sstory@sgt-inc.com
Colleen Brooks, NASA GSFC / SSAI, colleen.brooks@nasa.gov

In June-July 2017, NASA's Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS) Facility was deployed to sites in northern Canada and Alaska in support of NASA's ABoVE 2017 airborne campaign flying a total of 11 science flights in the region. LVIS-F is NASA's high-altitude airborne lidar sensor, collecting a nominal ~2km wide swath of data from 10km altitude above the ground. Footprints are contiguous both along and across track and for ABoVE operations, were ~6m in diameter. LVIS is a full waveform sensor. These data are collected for every footprint and georeferenced to provide a true 3 dimensional view of overflown terrain from whcih elevation, height and structure measurements and metrics are derived. After accounting for cloud cover, approximately 20,000km2 of surface data were collected by the mission. Level1B (geolocated waveform) and Level2 (elevation and height) data products are available to investigators via a NASA DAAC and the LVIS website at lvis.gsfc.nasa.gov/ABoVE2017map.html.

Poster Location ID: 115

Session Assigned: Vegetation Dynamics and Distribution