Accuracy assessment of terrain and canopy height estimates from ICESat-2 and GEDI LiDAR missions in temperate and tropical forests: first results

Abstract

Two new NASA spaceborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) missions launched in late 2018 the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) and the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) produce a new set of three dimensional data of Earth’s land surface. In this study we assessed the accuracy and precision of terrain and canopy height estimates from these two new LiDAR missions by examing the ICESat-2 ATL08 land and vegetation product, version 3 (Neuenschwander and Pitts 2019; Neuenschwander et al. 2020) and the GEDI L2A footprint elevation and canopy height metrics, version 1 (Dubayah et al. 2020a, Dubayah et al. 2020b). We conducted our analysis over temperate broadleaved and needleleaved forests, and tropical rainforest. For assessment of terrain and canopy height estimates from spaceborne LiDAR data we used high resolution airborne LiDAR (ALS) data.