ICESat-2 Cookbook

This Project Pythia Cookbook is a compilation of tutorials developed from 2019 to present as part of the NASA / UW eScience hackweek program. The purpose of the tutorials is to help people with data access and to demonstrate a variety of disciplinary use cases.

Motivation

The ICESat-2 mission provides valuable data for measuring changes in glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, clouds and land surface systems. There are numerous data products and methods for accessing and analyzing data. The goal of these tutorials is to streamline data access, reduce duplication of effort and build an open science community around ICESat-2 algorithms and software.

Authors

Ben Smith, Michalea King, Tyler Sutterley, Anthony Arendt

more to be added

Contributors

Structure

This cookbook is broken up into two main sections - "Foundations" and "Example Workflows."

Section 1: Foundations

• Mission Overview
• Data Access
• Filtering
• Geospatial Transforms
• Integration
• Cloud Computing
• Machine Learning
• Visualization

Section 2: Example Workflows for Specific Disciplines

• Land Ice
• Sea Ice
• Inland Hydrology
• Bathymetry
• Snowdepth

Running the Notebooks

You can either run the notebook using Binder or on your local machine.

Running on Binder

The simplest way to interact with a Jupyter Notebook is through Binder, which enables the execution of a Jupyter Book in the cloud. The details of how this works are not important for now. All you need to know is how to launch a Pythia Cookbooks chapter via Binder. Simply navigate your mouse to the top right corner of the book chapter you are viewing and click on the rocket ship icon, (see figure below), and be sure to select “launch Binder”. After a moment you should be presented with a notebook that you can interact with. I.e. you’ll be able to execute and even change the example programs. You’ll see that the code cells have no output at first, until you execute them by pressing {kbd}Shift+{kbd}Enter. Complete details on how to interact with a live Jupyter notebook are described in Getting Started with Jupyter.

Note, not all Cookbook chapters are executable. If you do not see the rocket ship icon, such as on this page, you are not viewing an executable book chapter.

Running on Your Own Machine

If you are interested in running this material locally on your computer, you will need to follow this workflow:

1. Clone the https://github.com/ProjectPythia/icesat2-cookbook repository:

    git clone https://github.com/ProjectPythia/icesat2-cookbook.git

2. Move into the icesat2-cookbook directory

   cd cookbook-example

3. Create and activate your conda environment from the environment.yml file

   conda env create -f environment.yml
   conda activate icesat2-cookbook

4. Move into the notebooks directory and start up Jupyterlab

   cd notebooks/
   jupyter lab