Awesome ICESat-2

A curated (and slightly opinionated) list of awesome ICESat-2 software, libraries, services, portals, and learning resources.

Inspired by awesome-sar. Initial listing generated by GPT5 during ICESat-2 Hackweek 2025. Contributions welcome.

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Contents

• General / Multi-Purpose
• Data Discovery & Access
• Cloud & Scalable Processing
• Data Analysis Tools
• Regional and domain-specific resources
• Visualization & Exploration
• Tutorials, Courses & Notebooks
• Standard Product Generation
• Quality, Calibration & Ancillary Data
• Related Missions & Complementary Datasets
• Community & Communication
• Contributing

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General / Multi-Purpose

• NASA ICESat-2 Landing Page

• NSIDC ICESat-2 Data Guide - Official product documentation, user guides, and ancillary references for all ATL datasets.

Data Discovery & Access

• Earthaccess - Search for, and download or stream NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code.

• icepyx - Unified interface for discovery, access, subsetting, and basic analysis of ICESat-2 (ATL*) products via NASA APIs.

• Earthdata Search - NASA web interface to discover, subset, and order ICESat-2 granules with custom spatial/temporal filters.

• NASA CMR API - REST search endpoint for programmatic discovery of ICESat-2 granules and collections.

• Harmony API - NASA cloud orchestration API for standardized reformatting, reprojection, and subsetting (emerging ICESat-2 support).

Cloud & Scalable Processing

• SlideRule Earth - Server-side, scalable ICESat-2 photon subsetting, filtering, and custom processing.

Data Analysis Tools

• pointCollection - A library of code for basic interactions with point data (including ICESat-2 tools)

• pointAdvection - A library of code for advecting ice features using velocity data for analyses in a Lagrangian frame of reference

• altimetryFit - A framework for fitting smooth surfaces to a variety of types of altimetry data.

• CapToolkit - A do-it-all library of code for working with cryospheric altimetry data.

Regional and domain-specific resources

• PhoREAL - A collection of software for analysis of ICESat-2 land and vegetation data.

• The Antarctic Rift Catalog Project - A project to map rifts in ice shelves around Antarctica.

• Grounding-Zones - Tools for Estimating Grounding Zone Locations with data from NASA Polar Altimetry Missions.

Visualization & Exploration

• OpenAltimetry - Web platform for interactive browsing, filtering, and quicklooks of ICESat-2 and ICESat elevation tracks.

• SlideRule Earth Example Notebooks - Notebook examples for dynamic photon queries and quick visual diagnostic plots.

Tutorials, Courses, & Notebooks

• ICESat-2 Pythia Cookbook - Compilation of tutorials developed from 2019 to present as part of the NASA / UW eScience hackweek program.

• ICESat-2 Hackweek GitHub Organization - Reusable Jupyter/Cloud workflow examples from community hackweeks.

• ICESat-2 Hackweek Websites - JupyterBook websites for ICESat-2 Hackweeks hosted at University of Washington 2019-2025.

• NSIDC Data Tutorials - Official step-by-step Python notebooks for opening, filtering, and plotting ATL datasets.

• OpenAltimetry Tutorials - Usage guides for track selection, filtering, and downloading subsets.

• CryoCloud Tutorials - JupyterBook for cloud computing including tutorials working with ICESat-2 data.

Standard Product Generation

• ATL11 - Code to generate the ATL11 (Slope-Corrected Land Ice Height Time Series) product based on the ATL06 (Land-ice height) product.

• ATL14/15 - Code to generate the gridded ice-sheet DEM and height-change products from ATL11.

Quality, Calibration & Ancillary Data

• ATL02 - Raw telemetry with photon time-of-flight and instrument engineering for advanced calibration research.

• ATL09 - Atmospheric layer & cloud flag data supporting photon filtering and canopy penetration assessment.

Related Missions & Complementary Datasets

• ICESat (GLAS) - Predecessor laser altimetry mission enabling multi-epoch elevation change assessment.

• GEDI - Spaceborne waveform lidar complementing ICESat-2 canopy height sampling for biomass analyses.

• CryoSat-2 - Radar altimetry mission offering complementary sea ice thickness and ice sheet elevation trends.

• Sentinel-1 SAR - Active microwave backscatter supporting surface type classification and change detection alongside elevation trends.

• Landsat Collection - Multispectral imagery for land cover context and seasonal melt pond / vegetation mapping.

• MODIS / VIIRS Snow & Sea Ice - Daily snow/ice products enabling temporal context for elevation/freeboard retrievals.

• DEM Auxiliary Data (REMA/ArcticDEM) - Polar DEM mosaics used for reference elevation and geolocation QA.

• ICESat GLAS (Legacy) - Historical laser altimetry providing multi-decadal context for elevation change.

• GRACE/GRACE-FO Mascon - Complementary mass balance signals to compare with ICESat-2 elevation change in ice sheets.

• ERA5 Reanalysis - Atmospheric state variables for correcting backscatter or interpreting surface processes.

Community & Communication

• NSIDC User Support - Helpdesk for data access, documentation, and product interpretation questions.

• Earthdata Forum - Official Q&A forum covering API access, subsetting, and dataset usage topics.

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Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please open an issue or pull request adding a resource with: (1) Name, (2) URL, (3) one-sentence description, (4) (sub)category suggestion. Keep descriptions concise, neutral, and avoid promotional language. Duplicates or out-of-scope links (non-ICESat-2 focused) may be declined to maintain curation quality.

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License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.