[1] Exchange of carbon between forests and the atmosphere is a vital component of the global carbon cycle. Satellite laser altimetry has a unique capability for estimating forest canopy height, which has a direct and increasingly well understood relationship to aboveground carbon storage. While the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICE...

[1] The small footprint ( 70 m) and 172 m alongtrack spacing of the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) on the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) provides unprecedented horizontal resolution for a satellite altimeter. This enables ICESat to map many previously unresolved features on ice shelves, such as crevasses, rifts, grounding zones and ice fronts. We present examples of ...

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) was mapped throughout China using large footprint LiDAR waveform data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) imagery and forest inventory data. The entire land of China was divided into seven zones according to the geographic charac...

The referee is correct about the bias introduced by seasonality, and a simple average of GLAS LAI over different months supports this hypothesis: 3.02 for May, 3.14 for June, 2.93 for October and 2.22 for November. However, we did not exclude the leaf flushing/senescence periods because we tried to maximize the usage of GLAS shots. The GLAS/ICESat mission was not operated year round but deploye...

The Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) aboard ICESat, launched in January 2003, has been designed to detect and monitor changes in the cryosphere. The first objective of this paper is to present highresolution ice-surface elevation maps derived from GLAS data, using geostatistical analysis. In a regional study of Walgreen Coast and Northern Ellsworth Land, West Antarctica, differences in ...

Measuring centimeter-scale and smaller surface changes by satellite-based systems on the periglacial terrains and permafrost zones of the northern hemisphere is an ongoing challenge. We are investigating this challenge by using data from the NASA Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (ICESat GLAS) and the JAXA Advanced Land Observing Satellite Phased Array t...

This paper focuses on the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) data availability over the 2 million km Cerrado, the Brazilian central savanna biome and one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Overall, about 2.5 million laser shots, distributed along the seven years of ICESat operation (2003–2009) and comprising three major seasonal domains,...

After GLAS (Geo-science Laser Altimeter System) loaded on the ICESat (Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite), satellite laser altimeter attracts more and more attention. ZY3-02 equipped with the Chinese first satellite laser altimeter has been successfully launched on 30 May, 2016. The geometric calibration is an important step for the laser data processing and application. The method to calcu...