A combined approach for ice sheet elevation extraction from lidar point clouds

Understanding the total mass balance of Earth's polar cryosphere is a significant aspect of estimating sea level rise due to climate change. Measuring ice sheet elevation and ground height is essential for determining the total glacier mass balance. Satellite-based and airborne photon-counting lidar sensors, such as the upcoming Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2), will provide accurate measurements of local topographical changes along space and time. Point clouds obtained from DIRSIG simulations are critical for scientists to develop algorithms that will be used for the upcoming ICESat-2 mission because they provide area truth for comparison. Three previous elevation-retrieval algorithms are reviewed and a new combined approach is presented. Results show that the combined approach can improve the accuracy when compared with only one of the previous three approaches.