Introducing icepyx, an open source Python library for obtaining and
working with ICESat-2 data
Abstract
Within a year of its launch date, the ATLAS altimeter on board ICESat-2
is already providing a wealth of critical data of interest across and
beyond the cryospheric sciences. With the satellite returning nearly 1
TB of raw data per day, traditional practices of individual research
groups downloading large granules of data and then subsetting,
processing, and storing them locally are ultimately impractical. We are
leading the development of icepyx (formerly icesat2py), an open source
Python library designed to easily query, filter, download, and
pre-process ICESat-2 datasets. The project’s documentation will include
interactive Jupyter Notebook examples, providing a starting point for
researchers to create and customize workflows to address their research
questions. We actively invite contributions from the community to ensure
the project develops in a way that meets a wide range of research needs.
The project aims to leverage existing libraries that enable easy
parallelization and can be run locally or on cloud-based platforms. As a
result, researchers will ultimately download and store minimally-sized
subsets of ICESat-2 data and have the opportunity to contribute their
code to an established open science project. This presentation will
serve to introduce icepyx to the cryosphere community and encourage
early adoption of the library by researchers with all levels of coding
experience.