Authors
MacFerrin, Michael J (CIRES,NOAA/NCEI), Amante, Christopher (CIRES,NOAA/NCEI), Love, Matthew (CIRES,NOAA/NCEI), Lim, Elliot (CIRES,NOAA/NCEI), Carignan, Kelly (CIRES,NOAA/NCEI)

Abstract

The Coastal DEM Team at CIRES/NOAA has developed a fully-functional and automated ICESat-2 Validation of Elevations Reporting Tool (IVERT) to generate land-based validation statistics of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) anywhere in the world using photon data from NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2). IVERT can rapidly query the outline of a DEM anywhere on Earth, automatically transform vertical and horizontal datums of ICESat-2 photons to match your DEM, mask out water bodies and urban structures as requested, identify and flag erroneous data and artifacts, and generate rigorous statistical analyses of the underlying DEM. Such statistics are used to evaluate DEM accuracy for coastal hazard modeling and many other scientific uses. IVERT has been used to successfully validate both low-resolution global DEMs (such as our ETOPO 2022 release) and high-resolution coastal DEMs, where it is reported in publicly-archived metadata reports accompanying the public releases of new datasets. IVERT is released both as a desktop tool as well as being hosted in a cloud-computing environment with a client-server command-line API.