Data Access and Formats

There is a host of different ways to access ICESat-2 data in particular and NASA data in general. This section provides a map to the current (as of August 2023) landscape of data access methods. It also provides an introduction to HDF5 and NetCDF, the file formats that ICESat-2 data products are stored in. The focus is on accessing data from a cloud compute instance in AWS us-west-2. However, some of the access methods and tools can be used from a local machine as well.

The tutorials are organized as follows:

• Overview provides an introduction to data access tools and offers some guidance on the capabilities and applicability of the different tools.

• Using NASA EarthData Search to Discover Cloud-Hosted Data describes how to use the Earthdata Search GUI search interface for NASA data. This is probably the simplest way to search for ICESat-2 and other NASA data.

• Using earthaccess to Search for, Access and Open ICESat-2 Data in the Cloud presents a Python package to search for NASA datasets and granules, and to download those granules, or, if you are in AWS us-west-2 cloud compute instance, open data files directly from cloud storage.

• Using icepyx to search, access and open ICESat-2 data in the cloud presents a data search and access tool specifically for ICESat-2.

• Overview of SlideRule Functionality describes an on-demand science data processing service. Using a client (either Python, Node.js, or the web), users can make requests to the different SlideRule web-services to generate customized data products or subset existing datasets.