ICESat-2 Bathymetric Log10 Tomogram Data

Bathymetry data (measurements of the elevations of submerged surfaces like the seafloor and lake beds) are an important factor in many scientific, economic, and engineering disciplines. Bathymetric surveys are widely used for benthic habitat mapping, flood inundation modeling, marine resource delineation, and nautical charting. While this ubiquity makes the generation of bathymetric data a high priority, acquisition of this type of data by traditional means (echosounding and/or airborne bathymetric lidar) can be infeasible in many remote or dangerous areas. As a result, the coastal and marine surveyors have recently turned to Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB) techniques. Perhaps the greatest development in the field of SDB came in September, 2018 with the launch of NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2). The Advanced Topographic Laser Altimetry System (ATLAS) on board ICESat-2 is a 532 nm, photon counting lidar and the first spaceborne lidar system capable of obtaining bathymetry measurements. Previous studies have shown that ATLAS is capable of obtaining bathymetry measurements up to a depth of 40m in clear water. However, due to the unique photon counting nature of ATLAS, there are many challenges still faced in developing algorithms to generate derivative products from ICESat-2 bathymetry data. In order to further the development of such algorithms and techniques, we've generated a database of 8531 high quality, log_10 tomograms derived from ICESat-2 ATL03 products containing bathymetry and collected over 13 sites across the globe. The database is further divided into training, validation, and test subsets, making it ideal for machine learning and deep learning applications.