User guide for NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper HDF5 Waveform Data Products

The Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) was a scanning lidar developed and used by NASA for observing the Earth’s topography for several scientific applications, foremost of which was the measurement of changing Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice. ATM measured topography to an accuracy of better than 5 centimeters by incorporating measurements from GPS (global positioning system) receivers and inertial navigation system (INS) attitude sensors.

This document is a user guide for NASA’s Airborne Topographic Mapper HDF5 waveform data products that are freely available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This user guide provides greater detail than the documentation published by a NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) such as NSIDC.

MATLAB® functions for working with ATM's HDF5 waveform data products are available at: https://github.com/mstudinger/ATM-waveform-tools

Also included is a HDF5 test file (described in the user guide, Section 10 "Test file for code development") for users who want to develop their own ingest code. The test file contains diagnostic amplitude values to help with code verification and testing. The gates in the test file have varying lengths to allow for testing of the 1-based pointer/index scheme.

Currently, there are three ATM waveform data products available from NSIDC:

See also:

https://github.com/mstudinger/ATM-waveform-tools