1 00:00:07,267 --> 00:00:08,500 I work on a small team 2 00:00:08,500 --> 00:00:11,600 called the Coastal Digital Elevation Model team. 3 00:00:11,600 --> 00:00:17,034 So the DEM Team, and we build digital terrain, landscapes 4 00:00:17,067 --> 00:00:20,634 of various places in the world, especially along the coastlines. 5 00:00:20,967 --> 00:00:25,134 So, both the topography over land near the shore 6 00:00:25,134 --> 00:00:28,468 and then the bathymetry going into the shoreline and underwater. 7 00:00:28,701 --> 00:00:32,468 And that topography is really critically important for 8 00:00:32,468 --> 00:00:36,368 hazard modeling for things like tsunamis and storm surges when 9 00:00:36,368 --> 00:00:38,001 an earthquake happens in Japan, 10 00:00:38,001 --> 00:00:40,702 and there's a giant wave coming across the Pacific, they, 11 00:00:40,702 --> 00:00:44,068 they spin up these models, and they see where flooding is going to happen. 12 00:00:44,068 --> 00:00:45,235 in Crescent City, Oregon, 13 00:00:45,235 --> 00:00:48,635 and you really accurate elevation models, both in the sea and the land, 14 00:00:48,635 --> 00:00:52,635 in order to be able to get those answers and evacuate people and, it saves lives. 15 00:00:52,635 --> 00:00:55,636 So we have to get really, really good information. 16 00:00:55,736 --> 00:01:00,703 One key factor that we didn't really have as a team up until about five years ago 17 00:01:00,703 --> 00:01:05,036 was a widespread way to validate these models to say, 18 00:01:05,036 --> 00:01:07,436 all right, how good is our model? How accurate is it? 19 00:01:07,436 --> 00:01:11,670 And so since we take in all the data we can to build these models, it's really hard 20 00:01:11,836 --> 00:01:15,437 without some external data set, some independently measured data 21 00:01:15,437 --> 00:01:17,370 set, to figure out how good our models are. 22 00:01:17,370 --> 00:01:21,370 And ICESat-2 fills that better than any other tool we've ever had. 23 00:01:21,537 --> 00:01:24,570 We use several of the ICESat-2 products: 24 00:01:24,570 --> 00:01:27,537 their ATL-03, which is their big point cloud product, 25 00:01:27,537 --> 00:01:29,837 we combine that with the ATL-08, 26 00:01:29,837 --> 00:01:33,571 that's their land and canopy surface because we're interested 27 00:01:33,571 --> 00:01:35,238 in where the bare earth ground is. 28 00:01:35,238 --> 00:01:37,271 We want to eliminate the trees. 29 00:01:37,271 --> 00:01:40,371 And so the fact that ICESat-2, they've got that built in on the science 30 00:01:40,371 --> 00:01:43,571 team’s products, to pick out where the ground is, 31 00:01:43,571 --> 00:01:46,538 what's ground elevations, and what's canopy elevations. 32 00:01:47,572 --> 00:01:50,438 The users of our digital elevation models that we build, 33 00:01:50,438 --> 00:01:52,938 it's actually a wide variety of user, 34 00:01:52,938 --> 00:01:57,605 because we do very high resolution local models to full on global models. 35 00:01:57,605 --> 00:02:01,372 We had a full global release of an Earth topography data set 36 00:02:01,372 --> 00:02:02,372 just a couple of years ago. 37 00:02:03,339 --> 00:02:05,972 And the users are--our closest users-- 38 00:02:05,972 --> 00:02:10,173 we work with our NOAA offices, for instance, the National Weather Service 39 00:02:10,173 --> 00:02:12,039 and the National Hurricane Center. 40 00:02:12,039 --> 00:02:14,506 We also work with a lot of 41 00:02:14,506 --> 00:02:17,506 state and local level agencies, 42 00:02:18,006 --> 00:02:20,307 cities, for instance, on infrastructure planning. 43 00:02:20,307 --> 00:02:23,840 They want new DEMs if they're going to be building coastal infrastructure. 44 00:02:24,273 --> 00:02:25,373 They need to know the, 45 00:02:25,373 --> 00:02:29,107 as precisely as possible, where the topography of their area is. 46 00:02:29,140 --> 00:02:30,907 And you’d think, well, they live there, obviously they know, 47 00:02:30,907 --> 00:02:33,974 but having detailed maps is not an easy thing to get. 48 00:02:34,007 --> 00:02:35,641 That's what our team specializes in. 49 00:02:35,641 --> 00:02:38,407 So the Applied Users Program since I've joined, 50 00:02:38,407 --> 00:02:42,974 we've started making a lot of connections with other teams that are 51 00:02:42,974 --> 00:02:46,675 both using ICESat-2 and also building tools into ICESat-2, so 52 00:02:46,908 --> 00:02:50,508 we're in connection with the team that's building out the ATL-24 product 53 00:02:50,508 --> 00:02:54,375 and having conversations with them. That’s the ICESat-2 bathymetry product 54 00:02:54,375 --> 00:02:56,408 that gets you, gets you, 55 00:02:56,408 --> 00:02:59,875 lake and ocean bottom surfaces in shallow waters. 56 00:02:59,975 --> 00:03:02,875 That we're going to be using that data, and we wouldn't have been in touch 57 00:03:02,875 --> 00:03:05,875 with them if it wasn't for the Applied Users Program. 58 00:03:05,875 --> 00:03:10,576 One of the big things that ICESat-2 does for us, that no other data set we could 59 00:03:10,576 --> 00:03:15,243 collect does, is give us high accuracy, high resolution 60 00:03:15,243 --> 00:03:19,443 elevation data around the world, anywhere on the world that we wanted. 61 00:03:19,443 --> 00:03:23,510 We can be validating DEMs over northern Russia, over northern 62 00:03:23,510 --> 00:03:28,043 Alaska, over southern Patagonia. It doesn't matter. Anywhere 63 00:03:28,043 --> 00:03:30,943 we are wanting to measure elevations, 64 00:03:30,943 --> 00:03:34,277 we can go pull the ICESat-2 data in that area and get it.