icesat2_webinar_demo

Laser Altimetry Applications for a Changing World: Working with ICESat-2 Sea Ice Data

Overview

This directory contains a notebook demonstrating how to work with ICESat-2 Sea Ice Data using earthaccess, xarray and matplotlib.

The demo was presented at the NASA Earthdata Webinar held on Wednesday, 6 August, 2025.

Learning Outcomes

1. How to search for ICESat-2 data sets (collections) using earthaccess.
2. How to search for data files using a time range and spatial extent.
3. How to open an ATL07 and ATL10 using xarray
4. How to make a simple plot of ATL07 data using matplotlib

Setup

You will need at least version 2024.10.1 of xarray and version 0.14.0 of earthaccess for this tutorial. We recommend creating a virtual environment using the environment.yml file in the environment folder using mamba or conda.

mamba env update -f environment/environment.yml

or

conda env update -f environment/environment.yml

This will create an virtual environment called nsidc-tutorial-icesat2-apps.

To activate the environment.

mamba activate nsidc-tutorial-icesat2-apps

or

conda activate nsidc-tutorial-icesat2-apps

You can now launch Jupyter Lab and navigate to working_with_icesat2_sea_ice_data.ipynb.

Bugs