A curated list of awesome ICESat-2 software, libraries, services, portals, and learning resources.
Inspired by awesome-sar with initial listing generated by GPT5 during ICESat-2 Hackweek 2025. Contributions welcome.
Contents¶
- General / Multi-Purpose
- Data Discovery & Access APIs
- Cloud & Scalable Processing
- Python Libraries
- Regional and domain-specific resources
- Visualization & Exploration
- Tutorials, Courses & Notebooks
- Standard Product Generation
- Quality, Calibration & Ancillary Data
- Related Missions & Complementary Datasets
- Community & Communication
- Contributing
General / Multi-Purpose¶
- NASA ICESat-2 Landing Page
- NSIDC ICESat-2 Data Guide - Official product documentation, user guides, and ancillary references for all ATL datasets.
Data Discovery & Access APIs¶
- Earthdata Search - NASA web interface to discover, subset, and order ICESat-2 granules with custom spatial/temporal filters.
- NASA CMR API - REST search endpoint for programmatic discovery of ICESat-2 granules and collections.
- Harmony API - NASA cloud orchestration API for standardized reformatting, reprojection, and subsetting (emerging ICESat-2 support).
Cloud & Scalable Processing¶
- SlideRule Earth - Server-side, scalable ICESat-2 photon subsetting, filtering, and custom processing with Python & C++ API clients.
Python Libraries¶
- icepyx - Unified interface for discovery, access, subsetting, and basic analysis of ICESat-2 (ATL*) products via NASA APIs.
- Earthaccess - Search for, and download or stream NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code.
- pointCollection - A library of code for basic interactions with point data (including ICESat-2 tools)
- altimetryFit - A framework for fitting smooth surfaces to a variety of types of altimetry data.
- CapToolkit - A do-it-all library of code for working with cryospheric altimetry data.
Regional and domain-specific resources¶
- PhoREAL - A collection of software for analysis of ICESat-2 land and vegetation data.
- The Antarctic Rift Catalog Project - A project to map rifts in ice shelves around Antarctica.
- Grounding-Zones - Tools for Estimating Grounding Zone Locations with data from NASA Polar Altimetry Missions.
Visualization & Exploration¶
- OpenAltimetry - Web platform for interactive browsing, filtering, and quicklooks of ICESat-2 and ICESat elevation tracks.
- SlideRule Earth Example Notebooks - Notebook examples for dynamic photon queries and quick visual diagnostic plots.
Tutorials, Courses & Notebooks¶
- ICESat-2 Pythia Cookbook - Compilation of tutorials developed from 2019 to present as part of the NASA / UW eScience hackweek program.
- ICESat-2 Hackweek GitHub Organization - Reusable Jupyter/Cloud workflow examples from community hackweeks.
- ICESat-2 Hackweek Websites - JupyterBook websites for ICESat-2 Hackweeks hosted at University of Washington 2019-2025.
- NSIDC Data Tutorials - Official step-by-step Python notebooks for opening, filtering, and plotting ATL datasets.
- OpenAltimetry Tutorials - Usage guides for track selection, filtering, and downloading subsets.
Standard Product Generation¶
ATL11 - Code to generate the ATL11 (Slope-Corrected Land Ice Height Time Series) product based on the ATL06 (Land-ice height) product.
ATL14/15 - Code to generate the gridded ice-sheet DEM and height-change products from ATL11.
Quality, Calibration & Ancillary Data¶
- ATL02 - Raw telemetry with photon time-of-flight and instrument engineering for advanced calibration research.
- ATL09 - Atmospheric layer & cloud flag data supporting photon filtering and canopy penetration assessment.
Related Missions & Complementary Datasets¶
- ICESat (GLAS) - Predecessor laser altimetry mission enabling multi-epoch elevation change assessment.
- GEDI - Spaceborne waveform lidar complementing ICESat-2 canopy height sampling for biomass analyses.
- CryoSat-2 - Radar altimetry mission offering complementary sea ice thickness and ice sheet elevation trends.
- Sentinel-1 SAR - Active microwave backscatter supporting surface type classification and change detection alongside elevation trends.
- Landsat Collection - Multispectral imagery for land cover context and seasonal melt pond / vegetation mapping.
- MODIS / VIIRS Snow & Sea Ice - Daily snow/ice products enabling temporal context for elevation/freeboard retrievals.
- DEM Auxiliary Data (REMA/ArcticDEM) - Polar DEM mosaics used for reference elevation and geolocation QA.
- ICESat GLAS (Legacy) - Historical laser altimetry providing multi-decadal context for elevation change.
- GRACE/GRACE-FO Mascon - Complementary mass balance signals to compare with ICESat-2 elevation change in ice sheets.
- ERA5 Reanalysis - Atmospheric state variables for correcting backscatter or interpreting surface processes.
Community & Communication¶
- NSIDC User Support - Helpdesk for data access, documentation, and product interpretation questions.
- Earthdata Forum - Official Q&A forum covering API access, subsetting, and dataset usage topics.
Contributing¶
Contributions welcome! Please open an issue or pull request adding a resource with: (1) Name, (2) URL, (3) one-sentence description, (4) (sub)category suggestion. Keep descriptions concise, neutral, and avoid promotional language. Duplicates or out-of-scope links (non-ICESat-2 focused) may be declined to maintain curation quality.
License¶
Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.