The ICESat-2 science team had
a group meeting, of course, virtually in this weird era that we're in.
And to make the meeting a little bit more interesting, our science team
lead Lori Magruder, she sort of challenged all the participants to find
what's most interesting thing that you've seen inside ICESat-2 data.
But I happened to find an example of where ICESat-2
flew over a hangar in Germany.
It's a very large building.
It's one of the largest buildings in the world, by volume and by footprint area.
And that old hangar has been turned into an indoor waterpark.
One side of the building is sort of polymer mylar type material.
And the other side, that polymer or mylar type material is clear.
And when ICESat-2 came over the top of the hangar,
it actually sent a signal through the clear polymer into the water
park, it hit the surface of swimming pool and returned a signal for that.
But then it also measured the bottom of the pool and returned a signal for that.
So in one pass, we have the surface of the hangar, the surface of the water
and the surface in the bottom of the pool. So effectively,
ICESat-2 is sampling bathymetry inside a building.
Bathymetry is basically how we refer to water column depth.
So that measurement, you know, you're bathymetric number is 20 meters.
That means from the surface of the water column down to the bedrock below
or the land below, there's a 20 meter differential.
Scientists are now working to develop those data products
and start to map some of our shallower water features.
One of the luckier parts of this is that we actually hit that hangar at night.
So a lot of the ambient background photons that you would receive in the
in the detectors, all of that is minimized because it's nighttime.
And that allowed us to be able to see possibly that indoor greenery,
definitely the two layers associated with the pool surface and the pool bottom.
And seeing all that and tossing that out in science team this, this
just blew away the competition.